Data Centres in Kenya: The Complete Verified List (2026)

Kenya has roughly a dozen data centres that a business can actually buy space in, and about half of them are genuinely carrier-neutral. The rest are operator-owned, government-run, or single-network cable landing sites.

This is the full list, with what each facility publishes about itself, what independent registries show, and — importantly — where the marketing and the evidence diverge. Every figure below comes from a page fetched on 29 July 2026 and linked at the point the claim is made.

The complete list of data centres in Kenya

The table covers every facility registered in Kenya on the PeeringDB facility register, plus operator-run sites that publish colocation offers. “Networks” is the PeeringDB count of networks that have registered a presence — the single best public proxy for how well-connected a building actually is.

Facility	Operator	Location	Type	IT load	Racks	Networks	IXs on site
NBO1 (Nairobi One)	iColo / Digital Realty	Langata South Road, Karen, Nairobi	Carrier-neutral	Not published	280	61	4
NBO2 (Nairobi Two)	iColo / Digital Realty	Bogani East Road, Karen, Nairobi	Carrier-neutral	6.5 MW (design)	Not published	2	1
MBA1 (Mombasa One)	iColo / Digital Realty	Miritini, Mombasa	Carrier-neutral	0.9 MW	250 operational	92	3
MBA2 (Mombasa Two)	iColo / Digital Realty	Nyali, Mombasa	Carrier-neutral	1.75 MW	600	40	3
NBO1	Africa Data Centres (Cassava)	Sameer Business Park, Mombasa Road	Carrier-neutral	7.5 MW site capacity	~160/floor × 4 floors	117	4
NBOX1	iXAfrica	Cabanas, Mombasa Road, Nairobi	Carrier-neutral	4.5 MW (phase 1)	780	42	3
NBO-1	PAIX Data Centres	Britam Tower, Upper Hill, Nairobi	Carrier-neutral	1.5 MVA total	240 cabinets	37	3
Thika Data Centre	Safaricom	Thika, Kiambu	Operator-owned, sells colo	Not published	Not published	2	0
Red Hill / Limuru	Safaricom	Redhill, Limuru	Operator-owned	2.8 MW at phase 2	Not published	—	—
Milimani Exchange	Telkom Kenya	Bishop Road, Upper Hill, Nairobi	Operator-owned, open access	Not published	100+	2	0
Telephone House	Telkom Kenya	Moi Avenue, Mombasa	Operator-owned, cable landing	Not published	Not published	9	0
Telephone House	Telkom Kenya	Koinange Street, Nairobi	Operator-owned	Not published	Not published	1	0
Konza National Data Centre	KoTDA (government)	Konza Technopolis	Government / neutral carrier	Not published	140 cabinets	—	—
NPS Primary Data Centre	National Police Service	Nairobi	Government, not commercial	Not published	Not published	—	—
SEACOM Mombasa CLS	SEACOM	Mombasa	Cable landing station	Not published	Not published	30	0
SimbaNET Nairobi	SimbaNET	Gateway Business Park	Operator-owned	Not published	Not published	2	0

Two clarifications. Wingu Africa does not operate in Kenya, despite appearing in many Kenyan round-ups — its own about page names Djibouti, Ethiopia and Tanzania only. And “East Africa Data Centre” and “Africa Data Centres Nairobi” are the same building: the Sameer Business Park facility opened as EADC and was rebranded when Liquid Telecom consolidated its data centre arm, now under Cassava. Uptime Institute’s records still file it under Liquid Telecom Group.

Carrier-neutral colocation, facility by facility

Carrier neutrality is the most consequential attribute on this list. A neutral building lets you cross-connect to any carrier present; an operator-owned building generally sells you the operator’s transit, and the economics follow. For the longer argument for keeping infrastructure in-country at all, see Why Local Cloud Infrastructure Matters for African Businesses.

iColo — a Digital Realty company (4 facilities)

iColo runs the largest facility count in Kenya and, at MBA1, the best-connected building outside Nairobi.

NBO1, Karen. iColo’s page describes NBO1 as launching in September 2019 as “the first truly carrier-neutral data center in Nairobi”, with 280 racks, 624 sqm of customer space, 60+ connectivity providers and four internet exchanges. The Digital Realty listing adds 20,000 ft² (1,858 m²), 2N power, N+2 cooling, PCI-DSS and ISO 27001, and 30-day CCTV retention. Neither page publishes an IT load figure for NBO1 — ask for committed and available capacity in kW before you size a deployment.

NBO2, Karen. Developing Telecoms reported in August 2024 that NBO2 carries a 6.5 MW IT load and was expected online in Q3 2025, within a master plan of three data centres plus a captive substation consuming over 20 MW at full build. The Digital Realty NBO2 page lists a 3,600 m² building with 2N power, N+2 cooling, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001 and 90-day CCTV retention. But PeeringDB shows only two networks and a single exchange there, on a record last updated September 2025 — a large, real, but still-ramping building, not yet a peer of NBO1 on connectivity. No operator page fetched for this article confirms a commercial live date, so ask for one directly rather than inferring it from the Q3 2025 target. Note also that Digital Realty gives NBO1 and NBO2 the same street address (“Langata S Rd & LRC Rd”) while PeeringDB places NBO2 on Bogani East Road — confirm which building you are actually being shown.

MBA1, Miritini, Mombasa. Opened 2017, 250 racks operational in 580 sqm, 80+ connectivity providers and three internet exchanges, per iColo — which also states the Miritini campus will eventually hold three data centres across 18,000 m², 13 MW and 1,800 racks. iColo’s homepage puts current IT power at 0.9 MW on a 4,000 m² site. At 92 registered networks, MBA1 is the densest interconnection point on the Kenyan coast.

MBA2, Nyali, Mombasa. Opened 2022, 600 racks, 1,200 m² of IT space on a 4,000 m² campus, 20+ networks, and — the detail that matters for a cable landing — 2 km to the nearest beach manhole, per iColo. Homepage IT load is 1.75 MW.

Africa Data Centres — Nairobi NBO1

ADC’s Nairobi page puts the facility at Sameer Business Park, Block A, Mombasa Road, with 2,000 square metres of secured server space and “Available site capacity 7.5 MW”. Its certification wording is specific: “4 Data halls certified Uptime Institute Tier 3 facility”, plus PCI DSS, and the page notes it was “first in the region to be PCI DSS Certified”. Cooling uses hot- and cold-aisle containment and the site runs non-potable water for cooling.

At 117 registered networks and four exchanges, ADC Nairobi is the most densely connected building in Kenya — BGP.Exchange, KIXP Nairobi, LINX Nairobi and PLUGINS IX are all present. That density is the product of a decade-plus head start.

On expansion: ADC announced two further Nairobi facilities in November 2021, the second at up to 20 MW IT load, with land for a third being secured, against a $200m+ commitment. It then broke ground on the Sameer expansion in January 2023, starting at 5 MW and scaling to an additional 15 MW, targeted for completion in the first half of 2024. No ADC page fetched for this article confirms that expansion completed, or states its current commissioned load. Ask for as-built capacity in the hall you would occupy, not the figure in the groundbreaking press release.

iXAfrica — NBOX1, Cabanas

iXAfrica is the newest large entrant and the one making the loudest hyperscale claims. Its own site describes NBOX1.1 at 4.5 MW IT load with 780 racks, a planned NBOX1.2 at 18 MW and 3,744 racks for a 22.5 MW campus, up to 40 kW available per rack, a campus PUE of 1.25, four fibre entry points, and free-air cooling. Phase one was unveiled on 28 February 2025 alongside a new KIXP point of presence, with LINX Nairobi also on site.

Be precise about the certification position. iXAfrica is widely described as “Tier III standard”. It does not appear in Uptime Institute’s Kenya awards directory, and no Uptime Tier certification, ISO 27001 or PCI DSS claim appeared on its own site when fetched. “Built to Tier III standards” is a design statement by the operator, not a third-party certification. That is not a criticism — plenty of excellent facilities are uncertified — but it is a different thing, and you should price it differently.

The commercially significant news: on 27 January 2026 iXAfrica announced it will host Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Nairobi region, with CEO Snehar Shah saying the company is “in execution mode to bring OCI to Kenya”. The release cites up to 50 kW per rack and free-air cooling. No launch date was given.

PAIX Data Centres — Nairobi NBO-1

PAIX took the opposite approach to everyone else: instead of a suburban campus, it built inside Britam Tower in Upper Hill. PAIX’s Kenya page confirms the Hospital Road address and states that both KIXP and Nairobi-IX are on site, calling it the “best connected data centre in Nairobi – all leading network operators present”.

At launch it was specified at 240 cabinets, 1.5 MVA total power, 690 m² of whitespace and a 99.982% uptime guarantee, with opening targeted for November 2020. PAIX’s group site refers to “ISO and PCI-DSS frameworks” rather than naming ISO 27001, and makes no Tier claim.

At 37 registered networks it is the smallest of the four Nairobi neutral facilities by connectivity, but its central location is genuinely useful if your staff, your bank and your regulator are all within walking distance.

Operator-owned and government facilities

Safaricom

Safaricom runs two relevant sites. Thika was awarded a “Tier III Concurrently Maintainable Design Certification” by Uptime Institute in September 2018, and is sold as colocation to banking, telecoms and financial services customers.

Red Hill, Limuru is the newer build. Safaricom completed phase one in March 2025, describing a three-building campus “built to Tier III standards”, using free cooling supplemented by solar, and targeting 2.8 MW at the end of phase two in January 2026. That was the target; no source fetched for this article confirms phase two actually completed on it, so treat 2.8 MW as planned rather than commissioned capacity.

Red Hill is also the strongest certification position in the country. Uptime’s directory shows Safaricom’s Red Hill holding both a Tier III Design certificate (foil marked expiring 2027) and a Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility awarded 26 March 2024. Constructed-facility certification means Uptime inspected the finished building, not just the drawings.

Telkom Kenya

Telkom operates the Milimani Exchange on Bishop Road in Nairobi and Telephone House in Mombasa, sold as open-access colocation. Telkom’s own page specifies capacity for “100 + racks of up to 52U rack height”, “4Kw dual input power per rack design”, N+1 cooling per room, three diverse fibre routes to the site, and dual standby gensets with A and B modular UPS. The Mombasa site offers cross-connects to submarine cable systems.

Telkom’s real strategic weight is as a cable landing party rather than as a colocation vendor — it holds 23% of TEAMS, 10% of LION2 and 2.6% of EASSy.

Konza National Data Centre

The government facility at Konza Technopolis holds the strongest formal certification record in Kenya. Uptime’s directory shows Konza with a Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility awarded 23 August 2022 and a Tier III Design certification dated 13 February 2020. It primarily serves government workloads and government cloud, and is not a mainstream commercial colocation option for a private business. Its own site (dc.konza.go.ke) did not resolve when fetched for this article, so current capacity, cabinet availability and commercial terms are not verifiable from a primary source — approach KoTDA directly if the facility is on your list.

Everything else on the register

The PeeringDB register also lists the SEACOM Mombasa cable landing station (30 networks), SimbaNET Nairobi at Gateway Business Park (2 networks), and Safaricom’s “Africa Digital Data Center – Thika” (2 networks). There is a fourteenth entry, registered simply as “Icolo” by Atima Creations Ltd on LRC Road, that appears to be a duplicate or third-party registration rather than a distinct facility — don’t count it.

Jamii Telecommunications (JTL/Faiba) sells colocation on its own network sites and towers, but does not operate a carrier-neutral facility of the class listed above.

Certification: read the exact words

This is where most Kenyan data centre marketing gets sloppy, and where a buyer can get burned. Uptime Institute issues three distinct things:

• Tier Certification of Design Documents (TCDD) — Uptime reviewed the drawings. Nothing has been inspected. These certificates carry expiry dates.
• Tier Certification of Constructed Facility (TCCF) — Uptime inspected and demonstration-tested the finished building. Substantially stronger.
• Tier Certification of Operational Sustainability (TCOS) — Uptime assessed how the facility is actually run.

“Tier III standards”, “Tier III design”, “Tier 3+” and “Tier III certified” are four different claims and only one of them means a third party inspected a building. Here is what Uptime’s Kenya directory actually shows:

Facility	Owner per Uptime	Award(s) shown	Date / expiry noted
Konza National Data Center	KoTDA	Tier III Constructed Facility and Tier III Design	Constructed 23 Aug 2022; Design 13 Feb 2020
Red Hill Data Center	Safaricom PLC	Tier III Constructed Facility and Tier III Design	Constructed 26 Mar 2024; Design foil marked exp. 2027
Icolo NBO1	ICOLO Limited	Tier III Design only	Awarded 16 Aug 2022; foil marked exp. 2024
Africa Data Centre NBO1.1/1.2/1.3 Phase 1	Liquid Telecom Group	Tier III Design only	Foil marked exp. 2022
New Thika Data Centre	Safaricom PLC	Tier III Design Documents	Date not shown
NPS Primary Data Centre	National Police Service	Tier III Design Documents	Date not shown

Three things follow. iXAfrica and PAIX do not appear in the directory at all, and neither claims Uptime Tier certification on its own site — their facilities may well be excellent, they are simply not Uptime-certified. Design certificates expire: the iColo NBO1 and ADC Nairobi foils shown in Uptime’s own directory carry expiry years of 2024 and 2022. The directory does not show whether either has since been renewed or superseded, so ask each operator for a current, dated certificate PDF rather than accepting the claim on the website. And ADC’s marketing and Uptime’s record are worded differently — ADC’s site says “4 Data halls certified Uptime Institute Tier 3 facility” while the directory shows a Design certification. Ask which halls hold which certificate type, and on what date.

For ISO 27001 and PCI DSS, Digital Realty lists both for NBO1 and NBO2, and ADC displays both on its Nairobi page. PAIX refers to “ISO and PCI-DSS frameworks” without naming a standard number. In every case, ask for the certificate and read its scope statement — a certificate scoped to a corporate function is not one scoped to your data hall.

Interconnection: KIXP, LINX and where the peering is

Kenya has one of the better-developed interconnection ecosystems in Africa, and it is concentrated in a handful of buildings. PeeringDB’s Kenya IX register shows six active exchanges and two defunct ones (Asteroid Nairobi and Asteroid Mombasa, both marked no longer in operation).

Exchange	City	Peers	Connections	Capacity	IPv6	Facilities
KIXP – Nairobi	Nairobi	135	150	2.9T	84%	ADC NBO1, iColo NBO1, iXAfrica NBOX1, PAIX Nairobi
LINX Nairobi	Nairobi	56	60	1.4T	95%	ADC NBO1, iColo NBO1, iXAfrica NBOX1, PAIX Nairobi
LINX Mombasa	Mombasa	50	52	1.6T	94%	iColo MBA1, iColo MBA2
KIXP-Mombasa	Mombasa	39	41	1.2T	92%	iColo MBA1, iColo MBA2
BGP.Exchange – Nairobi	Nairobi	0 registered	—	—	—	ADC NBO1
PLUGINS IX	Nairobi	0 registered	—	—	—	7 facilities listed

KIXP is operated by TESPOK, the Technology Service Providers of Kenya. At 135 peers and 2.9T of connected capacity it is the anchor exchange for the country.

The practical takeaway for anyone choosing a building: four Nairobi facilities carry both KIXP and LINX — ADC NBO1, iColo NBO1, iXAfrica NBOX1 and PAIX Nairobi. In Mombasa, both exchanges are exclusively in iColo’s two buildings. If peering matters to your design, that shortlist is your shortlist. If you are planning to run your own AS and peer directly, the mechanics are covered in How I Built a Full ISP Network in a Lab: BGP Multihoming with MikroTik.

Submarine cables landing in Kenya

Eight systems land in Kenya, all at Mombasa, per Submarine Networks: SEACOM, TEAMS, EASSy, LION2, DARE1, PEACE, Africa-1 and 2Africa. Equiano does not land in Kenya — it is a West Coast system, and Kenyan marketing that implies otherwise is wrong.

Cable	Route context	Kenya landing	Status / notes
SEACOM	East Africa to Europe/India	Mombasa	Operating; SEACOM runs its own Mombasa CLS, 30 networks registered
TEAMS	Kenya–UAE	Mombasa	Operating; Telkom Kenya holds 23%
EASSy	East/Southern Africa coast	Mombasa	Operating; Telkom Kenya holds 2.6%
LION2	Indian Ocean islands	Mombasa	Operating; Telkom Kenya holds 10%
DARE1	Djibouti–Somalia–Kenya	Mombasa	Operating
PEACE	France–Pakistan with Indian Ocean spur	Mombasa, landed 30 Mar 2022	192 Tbps design capacity; Telkom Kenya landing party; was the sixth cable into Kenya
Africa-1	~10,000 km, 11 landing points	Mombasa	8 fibre pairs; consortium includes Etisalat, G42, Mobily, PTCL, Telecom Egypt
2Africa	46 landing stations, 33 countries	Mombasa	Listed among Kenya’s landings

One more is on the way. Daraja is a 4,108 km, 24-fibre-pair system from Salalah in Oman to Mombasa, funded by Meta’s Edge Network Services subsidiary and supplied by ASN, expected ready for service in 2026. Twenty-four fibre pairs is a large number for this region — most systems serving Kenya carry far fewer.

The distinction that actually matters: a cable lands in Mombasa, but your capacity almost certainly terminates in Nairobi. Landing a cable at Nyali or Miritini does nothing for a Nairobi-hosted application unless somebody has bought and lit terrestrial capacity on the ~480 km inland route. That backhaul is a separate purchase, a separate failure domain, and a separate negotiation. When an operator quotes you “eight submarine cables”, ask which ones they have IRUs or lit capacity on, and where that capacity terminates.

Mombasa colocation makes sense if you are a network operator wanting cable-adjacent transit and low-cost coastal peering. For an application serving Kenyan users, Nairobi is where the eyeballs, the exchanges and the enterprise fibre are.

Hyperscalers in Kenya: what actually exists

Providers’ marketing blurs the line between a region, a Local Zone and an edge PoP. Here is what the providers’ own infrastructure pages say.

Provider	Region in Kenya?	What actually exists
AWS	No	Three CloudFront edge locations in Nairobi. A Nairobi Local Zone (af-south-1-nbo-1a) is listed as announced, not generally available
Google Cloud	No	No Kenya region on the global locations page. Africa CDN edge locations are Johannesburg, Lagos and Mombasa — note Mombasa, not Nairobi
Microsoft Azure	No	No Kenya region. The Olkaria project it backed is paused (below)
Oracle	Not yet	iXAfrica announced on 27 Jan 2026 that it will host an OCI region in Nairobi; no launch date published

So: as of July 2026, no hyperscaler operates a cloud region in Kenya. An edge PoP caches content; it does not run your VMs, hold your database, or satisfy a data residency requirement. An AWS Local Zone would run compute — but Nairobi’s is announced, not available. If you need in-country compute today, your options are colocation, a Kenyan cloud provider, or a dedicated server.

Power: the constraint that shapes everything

Kenya’s grid is unusually clean and unusually tight. Both facts drive data centre economics.

Clean. Geothermal is the largest single source of installed capacity at 943 MW, or 25.92% of the total, per an analysis by Peter Twesigye of the University of Cape Town, alongside 872.5 MW hydro, 514.1 MW solar and 436 MW wind. That is why every operator here leans on sustainability messaging.

Operators quote very different renewable percentages, though: iXAfrica cites 93% of Kenya’s grid, Developing Telecoms reported 82% of the generation mix in an iColo piece, and ADC’s own release said approximately 70% green energy. These measure different things — installed capacity versus generation, different years, different treatment of imports. Ask which basis a claim uses.

Tight. In January 2026 the system peak reached 2,439.06 MW against firm capacity of 2,495 MW — a reserve margin of 2.3%. System losses averaged 23.36% in 2025 against a 17.5% regulatory benchmark, and the transmission network faces an estimated US$4.38 billion financing gap (same source).

That tightness has already killed a headline project. In May 2026 Kenya paused the $1 billion Microsoft/G42 data centre at Olkaria, with President Ruto quoted as saying “to switch on that one data centre, we would need to shut off power for half the country.” It was designed to scale to 1 GW with a 100 MW phase one, against grid-connected capacity of 3,192 MW and a January 2026 peak of 2,444 MW. The same report notes a smaller 60 MW Olkaria EcoCloud facility continues, and that the 4–20 MW carrier-neutral facilities operating today do so without grid disruption.

What this means for a buyer. On-site generation and UPS autonomy are not paperwork items in Kenya — ask for genset runtime at full load, fuel contracts, and the last full-load test report. And be sceptical of any Kenyan facility promising tens of megawatts on a short timeline. The grid, not the building, is the binding constraint.

Solar is real but small. iColo commissioned over 450 kW of solar at its Nairobi campus and nearly 200 kW at Miritini, targeting 25% of facility power long term; Safaricom’s Red Hill uses free cooling supplemented by solar. Meaningful, but not grid independence.

PUE. iXAfrica is the only operator in this list publishing a campus figure: 1.25. No other Kenyan operator published a PUE on any page fetched for this article. Request a measured annualised figure for the last 12 months from anyone you shortlist — a design PUE is a modelling output, not a bill.

Regulation: licensing and data residency

Licensing. Until recently, Kenya had no explicit regulatory category for data centres. That changed in April 2026, when the Communications Authority’s updated Unified Licensing Framework expressly recognised data centres within the market structure. There is still no standalone data centre licence. Instead, operators map onto existing categories: a Network Facilities Provider (NFP) licence at Tier 2 or Tier 3 for operators deploying infrastructure or providing external connectivity, and an Application Service Provider (ASP) licence for colocation and managed services without public network infrastructure. The framework is activity-based, so an operator may hold more than one.

If you are a buyer, this is mostly good news: it removes the ambiguity that used to force case-by-case negotiation with the Authority. Ask a prospective provider which licences it holds.

Data residency. The localisation provision is section 50 of the Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019, headed “Processing through a data server or data centre in Kenya”:

“The Cabinet Secretary may prescribe, based on grounds of strategic interests of the state or protection of revenue, certain nature of processing that shall only be effected through a server or a data centre located in Kenya.”

Read that carefully: it is a power to prescribe, not a blanket rule that all Kenyan personal data must stay in Kenya. Most summaries get this wrong.

Where the power bites, the ODPC’s Guidance Note on Cross Border Data Transfer gives two alternatives at section 10.0: process the data “through a server and data centre located in Kenya”, or “Store at least one serving copy of the concerned personal data in a data centre located in Kenya” — a serving copy being “a replica or duplicate of personal data that is transferred out of the country.”

What counts is the part that catches commercial businesses off guard. Regulation 26 of the Data Protection (General) Regulations 2021 deems six purposes to be strategic interest processing — most secondary write-ups list only four. Per the same guidance note: civil registration and legal identity management; conduct of elections under the Constitution; any system for administering public finances by a state organ; any system designated a protected computer system under section 20 of the Computer Misuse and Cybercrime Act; early childhood or basic education under the Basic Education Act; and provision of primary or secondary health care for a data subject in the country.

Those last two matter commercially. A school running a student information system, a clinic running patient records, or the SaaS vendor selling to either has a statutory reason to need Kenyan floor space or a Kenyan serving copy — a legal hook, not a best-practice preference. VPS Hosting in Kenya: The Complete 2026 Buyer’s Guide works through the same law in more depth.

Take Kenyan legal advice before making a compliance decision; whether a given system falls inside one of the six is a legal judgement. But the practical move is often cheaper than the analysis — keeping personal data on infrastructure physically in Kenya removes an entire class of argument with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.

Under construction and announced

Kenyan data centre announcements slip — several in this list have. Treat the following as pipeline, not capacity.

Project	Operator	Announced capacity	Status as verified
NBOX1.2	iXAfrica	18 MW, 3,744 racks	Announced on operator site; no completion date published
NBOX2, Tilisi	iXAfrica	53 MW+, 11 acres	Listed as a planned future site
NBOX3	iXAfrica	Not published	Listed as a planned future site
Oracle Cloud Nairobi region	Oracle + iXAfrica	—	Announced 27 Jan 2026; no launch date
ADC Sameer expansion	Africa Data Centres	5 MW rising to +15 MW	Broke ground Jan 2023, targeted H1 2024; as-built status unverified
Second/third Nairobi ADC sites	Africa Data Centres	Up to 20 MW; third unspecified	Announced Nov 2021
Miritini campus build-out	iColo	13 MW total, 1,800 racks, 18,000 m²	Stated as future expansion
Olkaria (Microsoft/G42)	EcoCloud + G42	100 MW phase 1, 1 GW design	Paused May 2026
Olkaria EcoCloud (smaller)	EcoCloud	60 MW	Reported as continuing
AWS Nairobi Local Zone	AWS	—	Announced, not generally available

For market scale: a March 2025 portfolio database counted 11 existing and 7 upcoming Kenyan facilities, around 20 MW of current capacity and roughly 150 MW upcoming by 2028, with Nairobi accounting for over 90% of new power capacity. Set that 150 MW figure against a grid with a 2.3% reserve margin and you can see the tension.

How to choose a facility

Carrier neutrality is worth more than a Tier badge

A Tier III design certificate tells you about concurrent maintainability. Carrier neutrality tells you whether you can renegotiate transit in three years without physically moving. For most businesses the second is worth more money.

Test it directly: “If I want to add a second carrier who is already in this building, what do you charge me and how long does it take?” A genuinely neutral operator quotes a standard cross-connect fee and a lead time in days. Approval processes, “preferred partner” routing, or bundled transit you cannot unbundle are all soft lock-in.

Cross-connect economics

Cross-connects are how neutral data centres make margin, and they compound. Model a three-year total: initial cross-connects, the ones you will add, and the monthly recurring on each. Ask whether an internet exchange cross-connect carries a fee, and whether the IX port is billed by the operator or the IX. No Kenyan operator publishes cross-connect pricing publicly, so you will have to obtain quotes — insist on the same unit of comparison from each, or the numbers will not be comparable.

Power billing models differ more than power quality

Three common models: contracted capacity (you pay for what you reserve, used or not), metered draw plus a capacity reservation, or an all-in per-rack rate with a fixed allowance and overage. The same rack can differ substantially in annual cost depending on which you sign. Ask which model applies, the overage rate, and whether power is repriced when the utility tariff changes — in Kenya, tariff pass-through clauses matter.

Remote hands: scope, not slogans

“24/7 remote hands” means nothing until you pin down included hours per month, response SLA by severity, what counts as billable, the hourly rate outside inclusions, and whether after-hours carries a premium. If your team is in Nairobi and the facility is in Karen or off Mombasa Road, factor drive time honestly.

Questions to ask on the tour

Ask these in the building, not on a call.

1. Show me the current Uptime certificate PDF, and tell me whether it is Design or Constructed Facility, and its expiry date.
2. Show me the ISO 27001 certificate and read me its scope statement.
3. What is the committed IT load available in the hall you are showing me — not the site total?
4. What is measured annualised PUE for the last 12 months?
5. When was the last full-load generator test, and can I see the report?
6. How many hours of fuel at full load, and what is the refuelling contract?
7. Which exchanges are on site, and what does a port to each cost me all-in?
8. How many distinct carriers can I cross-connect to in this building today? Name them.
9. What are the diverse fibre entry points, and do they follow physically separate routes to the street?
10. What is the standard cross-connect fee, install lead time, and monthly recurring?
11. What is your power billing model and the overage rate per kW?
12. What is included in remote hands per month, and what is the response SLA?
13. Which of my neighbours in this hall are high-density, and what is your containment strategy?
14. What is the escalation path at 3am, and who answers?

Be honest about whether you need a data centre at all

Colocation makes sense when you own hardware, can refresh it, need physical control over assets for compliance, or run a workload large and steady enough that owning beats renting. It is a poor fit for a team of five running a web application: the capital cost, the spares inventory and the drive to Karen at 3am are all real, and none of them appear in a per-rack quote.

Where Lineserve fits

Lineserve runs a live Nairobi region, ke-1a, and sells both ends of this decision: managed compute if you want none of the above, and colocation if you want the rack. It also runs a Lagos region, ng-1a — if West Africa is your market instead, Data Centres in Nigeria: The Complete Verified List (2026) covers that landscape, where grid power rather than connectivity is the binding constraint.

If you want in-country compute without owning hardware, Cloud Servers is the primary route — a resource-based configurator rather than fixed instance families, at KES 433 ($4.33) per vCPU per month, KES 306 ($3.06) per GB of RAM, KES 25 ($0.25) per GB of SSD and KES 150 ($1.50) per IPv4, with an IPv6 /64 included free. The smallest Linux configuration starts at $13.89, and annual billing is 10 months for 12. If you would rather pick a preset than move sliders, Linux VPS plans run from S2 at KES 2,195 ($21.95) for 1 vCPU / 2 GB / 40 GB SSD to L1 at KES 8,330 ($83.30) for 4 vCPU / 8 GB / 160 GB SSD. Getting Started with Lineserve Cloud: Launch Your First VPS walks through a first deployment.

If you genuinely want a rack, Colocation is available in the Nairobi facility:

Option	Space	Power	Monthly
Single U	1U	1A / 120 W	$100 / KES 12,900
Quarter rack	10U	500 W	$1,000 / KES 129,000
Half rack	21U	1 kW, A+B redundant	$2,100 / KES 270,900
Full rack	42U	3 kW, A+B redundant	$4,200 / KES 541,800
Private cage	Custom	Custom	Quote

Power drawn above a footprint’s allowance bills at $500 / KES 64,500 per kW per month. If you want managed hardware instead of your own, Dedicated Servers run from $309 / KES 46,350 per month plus setup; backups and media archives fit Object Storage from KES 7.90 ($0.061) per GB per month with transfer and API requests free.

All live products carry a 99.9% uptime SLA, and the Nairobi region gives you data residency for the Kenya Data Protection Act. Lineserve does not claim an Uptime Institute Tier certification or an ISO certification — where those matter to your compliance position, that is a real reason to look at the certified facilities above instead.

Pay in your local currency using M-Pesa and other mobile money, bank transfer, or card. No foreign card or forex conversion is required. If you are also wiring up customer payments, Accepting Payments in Africa: M-Pesa, Paystack & Flutterwave covers the local rails; migrating off shared hosting first is covered in Migrating a Site from Shared cPanel Hosting to a VPS; and whichever way you go, put monitoring on it — How to Self-Host Uptime Kuma for Free Server Monitoring with Docker takes about twenty minutes.

Spin up a server at cloud.lineserve.net, or ask for a colocation quote if you are bringing your own hardware.

FAQ

How many data centres are there in Kenya?
Fourteen facilities are registered on PeeringDB, one of which appears to be a duplicate entry. Of those, seven are carrier-neutral colocation facilities you can meaningfully buy space in: four run by iColo/Digital Realty, and one each from Africa Data Centres, iXAfrica and PAIX. A March 2025 market database counted 11 existing and 7 upcoming using a broader definition.

Which is the largest data centre in Kenya?
By announced campus capacity, iXAfrica’s Nairobi campus at 22.5 MW — though only 4.5 MW of that is phase-one operational. By site capacity currently marketed, Africa Data Centres NBO1 at 7.5 MW. By network density, ADC NBO1 with 117 registered networks.

Which Kenyan data centres are Uptime Institute Tier III certified?
Only Konza National Data Centre and Safaricom Red Hill hold Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility. iColo NBO1, ADC Nairobi, Safaricom New Thika and the NPS Primary Data Centre hold Design certifications only, per Uptime’s directory.

Does AWS, Google Cloud, Azure or Oracle have a region in Kenya?
No. AWS has three CloudFront edge locations in Nairobi and an announced-but-unavailable Local Zone. Google Cloud’s nearest African CDN node is Mombasa, with no Kenya region. Oracle announced a Nairobi region hosted by iXAfrica in January 2026 with no launch date.

How many submarine cables land in Kenya?
Eight — SEACOM, TEAMS, EASSy, LION2, DARE1, PEACE, Africa-1 and 2Africa — all at Mombasa, per Submarine Networks. Daraja from Oman is expected in service in 2026. Equiano does not land in Kenya.

Is Nairobi or Mombasa better for colocation?
Nairobi for anything serving users, enterprises or government — it has four facilities carrying both KIXP and LINX. Mombasa for network operators wanting cable-adjacent capacity; both coastal exchanges live exclusively in iColo’s two buildings.

Do I have to keep Kenyan personal data in Kenya?
Not universally. Section 50 of the Data Protection Act, 2019 is a power for the Cabinet Secretary to prescribe processing that may only be effected through a server or data centre in Kenya, on grounds of strategic interests of the state or protection of revenue. Where it applies, the ODPC’s guidance requires either processing in Kenya or at least one serving copy held in a Kenyan data centre. Six purposes are deemed strategic interest under Regulation 26 of the 2021 General Regulations — including basic education and primary or secondary health care, which pull a lot of ordinary businesses in. Take Kenyan legal advice on your specific system.

Is Kenya’s power reliable enough for a data centre?
The grid is clean but tight: a 2.3% reserve margin in January 2026 and 23.36% system losses in 2025. Facilities in the 4–20 MW class operate fine on generator-backed designs. Anything at hyperscale runs into the transmission network — which is exactly what paused the Olkaria project.

The short version

If you are…	Look at
A network operator wanting maximum peering	Africa Data Centres NBO1 (117 networks, 4 IXs) or iColo NBO1
A network operator wanting cable-adjacent capacity	iColo MBA1 Miritini (92 networks) or MBA2 Nyali
Deploying high-density or AI/GPU racks	iXAfrica NBOX1 (up to 40 kW/rack, PUE 1.25)
Needing certified Tier III constructed facility	Safaricom Red Hill, or Konza for government workloads
Wanting a central Nairobi location	PAIX at Britam Tower, Upper Hill
A bank or insurer needing PCI DSS in the stack	iColo NBO1/NBO2 or Africa Data Centres, with certificate scope verified
A team of five running a web app	Not colocation — a cloud server or VPS in a Kenyan region

Kenya’s data centre market is genuinely good by regional standards: four Nairobi buildings with both major exchanges, eight landing cables, a mostly renewable grid, and a regulator that finally has a licensing category for the sector. The two things to be careful about are certification language and power. Read the exact wording on every Tier claim, ask for the certificate, and remember that the constraint on the next 150 MW is the transmission network, not anyone’s construction schedule.