Digital Realty Opens Nairobi AI Data Centre

Digital Realty has opened Nairobi Two, a 6.4MW data centre in Karen, strengthening Kenya’s position as one of East Africa’s most important cloud and interconnection hubs. The company announced that NBO2 adds new capacity to its Nairobi campus as iColo transitions fully into the Digital Realty brand in Kenya and Mozambique.

The facility sits about 300 metres from Nairobi One, and the two sites are now linked so customers can distribute critical workloads across separate buildings while maintaining operational continuity. For businesses that depend on cloud, payments, content delivery, enterprise systems and AI workloads, that resilience is not a small detail.

ITWeb Africa reported that Kenya’s ICT and Digital Economy Principal Secretary John Tanui urged Digital Realty to consider expanding capacity to 20MW, citing expected demand from artificial intelligence and other data-intensive workloads. That comment captures the real story: Kenya is not only adding data-centre space, it is trying to prepare for the next compute cycle.

Digital Realty says customers at the Nairobi campus can connect to more than 100 networks, two internet exchange points and a satellite teleport. That kind of interconnection matters because East Africa’s digital economy needs more than raw server rooms. It needs routes, redundancy, cloud access and low-latency links between companies, carriers and platforms.

The opening also follows a wider African data-centre conversation. In South Africa, civil groups are questioning the water and power cost of data-centre growth. In Kenya, the immediate tone is more optimistic, but the same long-term questions will follow any serious AI infrastructure expansion: energy, land, cooling, public trust and local benefit.

That is why NBO2 should be read together with the debate over data-centre trust . Africa needs more local capacity if it wants to reduce dependence on distant cloud regions. But infrastructure will only be sustainable if it is transparent, reliable and built with the local economy in mind.

Kenya has a strong case. It has subsea cable access, fibre connectivity, a growing enterprise technology market and a reputation as an East African digital gateway. The addition of more carrier-neutral capacity could help local and regional companies keep workloads closer to users, support data sovereignty and improve service reliability.

The AI angle makes the timing sharper. As Africa’s AI infrastructure debate grows, countries with credible cloud and interconnection capacity will have an advantage. AI services, fintech systems, health platforms and public-sector tools all need somewhere dependable to run.

Digital Realty’s Nairobi expansion is therefore not just a real estate story. It is a signal that East Africa’s digital infrastructure is becoming more serious. The question now is how quickly demand catches up with capacity, and whether Kenya can turn its data-centre advantage into broader technology growth.