Snehar Shah primes data centre to attract global tech giants

In this interview with the Business Daily, he dives deep into his vision for the company which is targeting global tech giants, and how he wants to differentiate IX Africa from other data centres.

Investors have set up a number of data centres in the country recently. What is driving this investment and how is Kenya positioned in the data centres market?

Kenya is well positioned especially because of our green power availability. Big companies have ambitious targets regarding reducing carbon emissions which puts Kenya in a preferential place to fill in that gap for data centres.

What unique strategy are you employing to set IX Africa apart from other data centers?

Our strategy is to target what we call the hyper-scalers. These are companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google, Oracle, SAP, Alibaba and TikTok. Currently, they are hosting their cloud outside Africa in places like Virginia in the US, Frankfurt, London or Marseille in Europe or Singapore in Asia.

We are also building a pipeline of our local clients such as banks to come here. Many banks have their local on-premises data centres which they have invested in over time but tend to outsource what we call business recovery with external data centres like ours. We are in discussions to bring that business on board while we also target the hyper-scalers.

What are the benefits of hosting the cloud locally?

Because the industry is rapidly evolving, data sovereignty is a big deal with regulators raising data protection concerns. They want banks, fintechs and such kind of companies, and the government itself to hold their data in-country.

That means there is need for cloud service providers to be present here. There are latency issues as well because as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes key and corporates and individuals are incorporating it in their daily lives, then low latency is very key.

Currently, for example, a Google query will take more than 200 milliseconds. That is too late to get a good customer experience. Some of these AI companies need a latency of less than 50 milliseconds, and if we host the cloud locally, that is advantageous.

What are the challenges that data centres face in the Kenyan market?

For us it is about making sure that we are keeping abreast with the market demand so that we can deliver our infrastructure on a timely basis.

But we would like to have more support from the government, because if there are credible and experienced private players to do this (build data centres), then there is no need for the government to replicate that.

It wouldn’t make sense for the government to build data centres in Konza (the Konza Technopolis) because Konza is inviting people like us to build.

Are there enough qualified experts to work in the country’s growing data centres market and what are individual players doing to grow the current talent pool?

As the industry grows, the need for talent in this area will be crucial. Together with Moringa School, we are currently putting together an expert school on data centre skills.

We will jointly develop a syllabus for that course and at IX Africa we are also providing internships so that they get work experience and absorb that talent.

What informed the location of this data centre (on Mombasa Road) and the one you are establishing in Kiambu (at Tilisi in Limuru)?

This location has very good fibre connectivity. We have all the fibres coming from the landing stations in Mombasa to serve Nairobi and go all the way to Malaba to serve the rest of the region.

We are located near the airport in a very secure area which is key for a data centre. We also own this land as opposed to leasing which is beneficial from a stability point of view.

At Tilisi, [in Kiambu] there power is readily available and also the weather is very ideal from a cooling perspective. Limuru is 3-4 degrees Celsius cooler than Nairobi which makes cooling much more efficient.

How much does it take to establish a data centre in Kenya?

The rule of thumb is something like $10 million (Sh1.48 billion) per megawatt (MW). But we have managed to optimise our building approach which allows us to build at a much lower cost per megawatt than that $10 million benchmark.

Talking of power, electricity prices remain very high in Kenya and data centres are huge consumers of electricity. How does this translate in your pricing?

There is a standard model for pricing because the data centre business is a mix of real estate and power provision.

There is a footprint charge for the space. We have invested a lot in power generation, the redundancy to have uptime of 99.99 percent of power availability.

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