A plot of land that could have been home to East and Central Africa's largest data centre still sits idle, with no sign of construction starting any time soon.
Backed by a $30 million (Sh3.86 billion) capital injection from the United States’ Development Finance Corporation (DFC), African Data Centres (ADC) had targeted to triple the capacity of its Nairobi plant to over 15 megawatts (MW), delivering the region its largest cloud storage facility yet.
At the time of the ground-breaking ceremony in January last year, all plans were in place and ADC exuded confidence that the new facility would be complete by mid-this year, but nearly 18 months on, construction has not started.
ADC’s interim chief executive officer, Finhai Munzara, told Business Daily that this was a result of unforeseen delays occasioned by supply chain disruptions and geopolitical tensions witnessed last year.
“Securing some of the critical equipment that needs to be in there requires long lead times and some of those lead times have been affected by the global geopolitical situations and some of the supply chain issues,” Mr Munzara said.
However, the ADC acting chief said, most of the preliminary stages of developing the data storage facility, such as the design and tendering processes, have already been completed and it’s now just a matter of implementation.
“I would say 50 percent of the work that needs to be done has been done and now it’s really around the execution and actual building. We expect that the additional capacity will be coming online in the next 12 to 18 months,” he added.
The expansion had been necessitated by the fast-growing demand for cloud storage services in Kenya, which was fast outpacing the capacity of available data centres in the country.
Mr Munzara says that while their current capacity can still meet the demand, almost half of the upcoming capacity has already been pre-booked by their existing clients, who expect their needs to almost double by the time the new facility comes on stream, underlining the rapidly growing digital economy in the country.
Ultimately, the ADC facility is expected to expand to over 25-megawatt capacity, making it the largest data centre in the wider Eastern and Central Africa region and one of the largest on the continent.
Despite their significant role in driving digital transformation across the globe, Africa has very few data centres. Available statistics indicate that only one percent of the world’s data centres are in Africa, though the continent being home to almost 20 percent of the world’s population.
