ADC breaks ground for expansive facility

Sameer Business Park. [Edward Kiplimo, Standard]

Africa Data Centres (ADC) on Thursday broke ground for the construction of a bigger facility at Nairobi's Sameer Business Park which will expand its capacity from the current 5MW (Megawatts) of IT load to 15MW.

This expansion comes as the need for colocation (a data centre facility businesses can rent space for servers and other computing hardware) increases and institutions, including government corporations, digitise and automate their services in a major digital transformation.

British High Commissioner to Kenya Jane Marriott labelled Kenya "one of the most exciting places to be in tech on the continent and around the world right now" with the presence of "the people, the drive, education and intelligence," and praised the local data protection regime.

The UK, she said, has since 2018 invested $220 million (Sh27.3 billion) into such technology across Africa.

Increasing demand

The Sameer facility is already the most connected data centre in the Eastern African region, and ADC plans on further investing $500 million (Sh62 billion) into building hyperscale data centres across Africa with the support of the US Development Finance Corporation.

"Our investment into expanding our data centre operations in Kenya is in line with the increasing demand that we are experiencing due to the significant increase in the adoption of digital services in the East African region," said Hardy Pemhiwa, group president and chief executive of Cassava Technologies, a Pan-African technology group which owns Africa Data Centres.

Tesh Durvasula, CEO of Africa Data Centres, said that the expansion will enable ADC clients to grow and scale depending on their requirements.

"They can start small, increase to a medium capacity, and even benefit from a hyperscale type of deployment in a few years if they choose to. This will enable customers to operate multiple deployments across our sites with a single operations team, campus, and infrastructure they are familiar with," he said.

The new facility, including all critical plant rooms, will be prefabricated off-site. This ensures the highest possible quality, whilst local contractors will still benefit from contracts to lay foundations, assemble, and complete the build, ADC said.