Airtel's African unit is planning to develop a data center in Nairobi, Kenya.
The facility follows Airtel's plans for a 36MW data center in Lagos, Nigeria, for which construction is set to begin shortly.
According to current CEO Segun Ogunsanya, the Nairobi facility will have 7MW of IT capacity. Further details, including timelines, weren't shared.
"We are going to break ground in Nigeria in the next couple of weeks and the one in Kenya will follow soon. Construction takes about two years, so we’re looking at them coming into operation probably sometime in mid-year 2026," said Ogunsu in a conference call at the beginning of February.
Airtel Africa, owned by Indian telco Bharti Airtel, says that the local data center capacity will help to speed access to digital services and will improve the cost of managing data.
Announced in January this year, Ogunsanya is set to retire in July 2024 and will be replaced by Bharti Airtel's Sunil Taldar. The company has appointed former AWS head of global data center portfolio management Yashnath Issur as CEO of Nxtra in Africa.
This follows just one month after the company launched its data center business, Nxtra Data Centers, in Africa. Nxtra is jointly owned by Airtel Africa and Carlyle, with the latter taking a 24 percent stake.
The Nigeria and Kenya data centers are being developed under the Nxtra brand. The Lagos facility is the first of Nxtra's five planned hyperscale data centers on the continent. Following the Nairobi development, the company intends to develop smaller data centers at their mobile cable landing stations in Tanzania, DRC Congo, and Gabon.
Separate from Nxtra, Airtel Africa already has 40 Edge data centers on the continent. The Nxtra Data Center business also has a presence in India, the home country of Bharti Airtel, where it operates 12 data centers and 120 Edge facilities or Points-of-Presence.
In addition to developing data centers in Africa, Airtel has been deploying 5G sites, the majority of which are in Nigeria and Kenya, the latter launched in July 2023, with some in Zambia and Tanzania.
