Nairobi Adds 6.4MW As Icolo Becomes Digital Realty

Digital Realty has opened the 6.4-megawatt Nairobi Two (NBO2) data centre in Karen, expanding its Nairobi campus and completing the transition of iColo, the East African operator it acquired, to the Digital Realty brand in Kenya and Mozambique.

The facility is located roughly 300 metres from Nairobi One (NBO1), the carrier-neutral facility iColo opened in 2019. Together, the two sites allow customers to deploy critical workloads across separate buildings while maintaining continuity.

NBO2 also provides access to more than 100 networks, two internet exchange points and a satellite teleport, offering an additional connectivity route to locations where terrestrial infrastructure is limited.

“By connecting Nairobi Two with Nairobi One,” said Wanja Muriithi, Country General Manager for Kenya at Digital Realty, the company has “strengthened the resilience available to customers.”

Muriithi said the new facility adds high-density capacity for enterprises, cloud providers, networks and digital platforms. She also said Kenya is positioned to benefit from growing demand for AI infrastructure, supported by its technology ecosystem, international connectivity, skilled workforce and renewable-heavy electricity grid.

For a market where interconnection density can determine a data centre’s value as much as physical capacity, the network count is a significant specification. A facility’s usefulness to a bank, cloud provider or ISP depends largely on how many other networks and services it can reach without leaving the building.

What the rebrand signals

The transition of iColo to Digital Realty, a New York-listed company that describes itself as the world’s largest cloud and carrier-neutral data centre operator, brings the Kenyan and Mozambican operations into its global network.

Such acquisitions can expand what local facilities offer, including standardised contracts, cross-border capacity commitments and a single commercial relationship for customers operating across multiple markets.

The Nairobi campus also has room to grow. Reporting on the site’s master plan has described a three-facility development with a captive substation, potentially taking the campus beyond 20MW at full build and placing it among the region’s larger single-site concentrations of data centre capacity.

The reform being advertised

The launch also doubled as a government showcase, with policy reform emerging as one of the event’s key talking points.

In its account of the event, the government attributed the investment partly to reforms aimed at making Kenya more competitive. These included the removal of local shareholding requirements for ICT investments, changes to taxes affecting digital exports, the Kenya Cloud Policy and the National AI Strategy 2025 to 2030.

The removal of local ownership requirements could have implications beyond the data centre sector. Ownership thresholds have been among the more contested issues in African technology investment. In South Africa, for example, a requirement that certain licensees be 30 percent owned by historically disadvantaged groups has been cited in debates around Starlink’s market entry.

Kenya is now promoting a different proposition: foreign technology operators can own their Kenyan entities outright. The Digital Realty investment provides a high-profile example of the policy environment the government is seeking to promote.

John Tanui, Principal Secretary for ICT and the Digital Economy, said the government was focused on creating an environment that attracts investment into the digital economy while opening opportunities for young Kenyans.

The government also said it would soon issue guidelines identifying priority locations for future data centre investment. The initiative will take a multi-agency approach to factors including power availability, fibre connectivity, land, water, security, skills and investment facilitation.

The list effectively reflects many of the infrastructure and operating conditions that determine where large-scale data centres can be built.

The room

The attendance at the launch underscored the commercial and diplomatic significance of the investment, which came shortly before the AmCham Business Summit.

Those present included Frank Garcia, US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs; Susan M. Burns, US Embassy Chargé d’Affaires in Nairobi; Stephen Isaboke, Principal Secretary for Broadcasting and Telecommunications; Philip Thigo, Special Envoy on Technology; David Mugonyi, Communications Authority Director-General; John Walubengo, Deputy Data Protection Commissioner; James Turuthi, Frontier Optical Networks and KeNIC Deputy Chief Executive; Fiona Asonga, TESPOK Chief Executive; Michael Jacobs, Pembani Remgro Infrastructure Managers; and Marcel Louw, Digital Realty Managing Director for Africa.

The presence of both communications and data protection regulators alongside American diplomatic representatives reflects the intersection in which major data centre investments operate, between digital sovereignty, regulation, infrastructure and foreign capital.

The government also noted that the launch took place at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, where IBM established its Kenyan presence about 13 years ago. The institution was cited as an example of how university, industry and government partnerships can contribute to the development of technology ecosystems.

What happens next will be more measurable: the publication of the promised guidelines on priority data centre locations, whether the Nairobi campus proceeds to its third facility and captive substation, and which cloud providers and regulated institutions take capacity in NBO2.

Those indicators will ultimately show whether the additional megawatts translate into workloads and digital infrastructure that remain in Kenya.