Airtel has pushed the completion date for its Nxtra data centre at Tatu City to July 2027, about a quarter later than the first-quarter 2027 target given when work started in September 2025.
The 150 million US dollar campus is billed by Airtel as the largest data centre in East Africa when finished, roughly ten times the size of anything currently operating in the region, TechTrends reports. It is designed to host large-scale artificial intelligence workloads and other data-heavy services.
On paper the site is built for 44MW of power delivered in two 22MW phases, with a target power usage effectiveness below 1.4 and 99.999 per cent availability. GPU-ready racks were designed in from the start. It sits inside the Tatu City Special Economic Zone and draws from a dedicated 135MVA substation, topped up by on-site solar.
Groundbreaking in September 2025 was attended by ICT Cabinet Secretary William Kabogo, Communications Authority assistant director for compliance Peter Ikumilu, Nxtra Africa chief executive Yashnath Issur and the then Airtel Kenya managing director Ashish Malhotra.
The Nairobi build is one piece of a much larger push behind Nxtra Data, Airtel’s data centre arm. In April the group confirmed a one billion dollar investment into Nxtra alongside Alpha Wave Global, The Carlyle Group and Anchorage Capital Group, valuing the subsidiary at 3.1 billion dollars with Airtel keeping control. Most of that money is earmarked for India, but Airtel says it also supports African builds. Lagos, Kinshasa, Mombasa, Kampala and Dar es Salaam have all been flagged for expansion.
Airtel Kenya’s new managing director Djibril Tobe said global technology firms including Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Apple are in talks about hosting at the Nairobi site. None of those companies has confirmed the discussions. Tobe was speaking on Monday at the launch of Bizna Wallet, a business wallet aimed at small firms.
Even on the later timeline, Nxtra would overtake iXAfrica’s 22.5MW Nairobi facility as the largest publicly announced data centre in East Africa by installed capacity.
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Source: TechTrendsKE
