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UK-based firm Cassava to deploy Kenya’s first rentable AI servers
A visitor records details of racks for data servers, GPUs and CPUs during a tour inside the Nebius AI UK data centre, a new facility hosting NVIDIA and other computer firms at Ark Data Centres, in Chertsey, Britain on November 6, 2025.
Cassava Technologies, the parent company of Africa Data Centres (ADC) and Liquid Telecom, has announced plans to deploy rentable artificial intelligence (AI) servers at its upcoming facility in Nairobi, marking a major step in Kenya’s digital innovation journey.
The London-based firm said it has partnered with NVIDIA, the American chip maker, to roll out a Graphics Processing Unit-as-a-Service (GPU-as-a-Service) offering in Nairobi, the first of its kind in the country.
A GPU is a specialised computer processor capable of performing many calculations simultaneously. While originally designed for graphics, GPUs are now widely used to train and run AI models, which require high computing power.
The servers will be hosted at ADC’s new 10-megawatt data centre, whose construction began in 2023 and is expected to be completed next year, setting the stage for the development of home-grown AI models in Kenya.
“We want to enable African businesses to emerge as leaders and innovators in AI, not just consumers,” said Hardy Pemhiwa, Cassava CEO.
“We want to empower Africa to write our own AI future, in our own languages, with our own data using local compute infrastructure.”
Similar servers will also be deployed in ADC facilities in Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco and South Africa, putting them among the first African countries to host local compute infrastructure capable of running advanced AI workloads.
If implemented, the plan could strengthen Kenya’s position as a regional hub for global and local AI innovation.
In its national AI strategy, the government had pledged to support investment in local data centres that can store and process the large datasets required for AI development, as a key step toward improving data sovereignty in the digital era.
Currently, Kenyan data centres provide AI-ready infrastructure such as server racks and cooling systems, but none offer rentable GPUs that developers can access on demand.
Besides Cassava, several multinational tech firms have announced plans to build data centres in Kenya, though progress has been slowed by limited power supply.
President William Ruto recently revealed that, despite signed contracts with Microsoft and G42 to build “world-class” data centres in Kenya, electricity generation constraints have delayed their implementation.
