IXAfrica begins construction of East Africa's largest hyperscale-ready datacentre at 42.5MW

March 29, 2021

IXAfrica announced earlier this month the start of significant investment in Kenya's digital economy, with an ambitious plan to build a world-leading and sustainable campus at a prime location in Nairobi.

Guy Willner, Chairman of IXAfrica and ex-President Europe of Equinix Inc, commented: "I am happy to announce that we have broken ground on a major Internet Infrastructure project in Nairobi. We are committed to helping the next generation of tech entrepreneurs in Kenya by providing world-class access to datacentres and networks, welcoming the arrival of hypercloud to East Africa and providing on-campus offices and facilities to allow new tech business to thrive."

IXAfrica datacentres are designed to accommodate modern high-load servers and infrastructure for ultra-dense computing in accordance with the latest global standards. During construction, we will have the best energy-efficient and engineering solutions, including several green initiatives.

Alongside sustainability, data sovereignty is also a major issue across the planet and IXAfrica's new hyperscale-ready campus will allow companies to fully comply with privacy and localisation laws whilst also providing the fastest, lowest latency access possible to the countries of the Greater East African Region (over 300 million population).

IXAfrica's customers will enjoy the strategic location of the data centre combining proximity to recent 66kV electrical substation builds and the junction of most fibre optic cables for the region. This will create a vast and reliable Internet ecosystem of cloud and technology companies on-campus, complemented by a large volume of serviced office space and extensive satellite landing station capacity.

Willner said: "We believe our ambitious project will allow both enterprises and government to further harness technology to help create a greener future.

"Our team members each have twenty years of experience in the datacentre industry and this, combined with strong investor support and the trust of our many international clients and partners give us grounds to be confident that we will achieve our main goal - to become the leading datacentre operator in Kenya."

Niraj Shah, VP Sales and Business Development at IXAfrica added: "Our ambitious build plan reflects the growing need for quality Internet infrastructure in Kenya, and our first phase campus of 4.5acres allows us to start our project. We are already in discussion with several major international Internet companies who have been eyeing the market but who have been frustrated through the lack of credible datacentre capacity here. We are all excited to see the site build commence."