Digital Realty is investing $80 million in a new data center in Nairobi, expanding its infrastructure footprint in Kenya as demand for cloud computing, artificial intelligence and digital services accelerates across East Africa.
The investment adds 6.4 megawatts of capacity through Digital Realty’s new Nairobi Two (NBO2) facility, strengthening the company’s Nairobi campus alongside its existing Nairobi One (NBO1) data center.
The expansion gives Digital Realty additional capacity to serve enterprises, cloud providers, telecom companies and technology businesses that need locally hosted infrastructure and high-speed connections to global digital networks.
The company’s Nairobi campus provides access to more than 100 networks and two internet exchange points, positioning the facility as an important connectivity hub for East Africa.
The investment comes as Nairobi attracts increasing amounts of capital into data centers and other digital infrastructure, driven by rising cloud adoption, fintech, enterprise digitization and growing demand for computing capacity.
For Kenya, the expansion is particularly significant as AI workloads begin driving a new wave of demand for high-performance computing and data storage.
Digital Realty has also brought iColo’s Kenyan and Mozambican operations under the Digital Realty brand, integrating the regional facilities into its global PlatformDIGITAL network.
The Nairobi expansion underscores the growing importance of Kenya as a digital infrastructure market and a gateway connecting East African businesses to global cloud and technology platforms.
At $80 million, the investment also highlights how the economics of Africa’s technology sector are increasingly shifting from software alone toward the physical infrastructure required to run it.