Airtel has revised the completion date for its flagship Nxtra data centre in Tatu City to July 2027, extending the timeline by roughly six months from the first-quarter 2027 target set when construction broke ground in September 2025.
Despite the delay, the numbers behind the project remain striking. The $150 million facility is on track to become East Africa’s largest data centre approximately ten times the size of any existing facility in the region once operational. Even under the revised timeline, Nxtra is set to eclipse iXAfrica’s 22.5MW Nairobi facility, currently the region’s largest publicly announced data centre by installed capacity.
Newly appointed Airtel Kenya Managing Director Djibril Tobe revealed interest from major global technology players is already building.
“All the big players like Google, Microsoft they’re already talking to us. Oracle and Apple are also talking to us to be able to be hosted on that data centre, because that will make their services seamless. They can mirror all the servers within that data centre, and that will enhance the customer experience,” Tobe said during the recent launch of Bizna Wallet, a dedicated business wallet designed to help small businesses manage their finances through a digital solution.
The Tatu City campus is engineered around a 44MW power capacity, rolled out in two 22MW phases, with a target power usage effectiveness (PUE) below 1.4 and an ambitious 99.999% availability guarantee. Critically, the facility has been designed with GPU-ready racks from the ground up positioning it to host large-scale artificial intelligence workloads and other data-intensive digital services as demand across East Africa accelerates.
Power resilience is central to the design. The site draws from a dedicated 135MVA substation within Tatu City’s Special Economic Zone, supplemented by on-site solar generation, a hybrid approach aimed at insulating operations from grid instability.The Nairobi build is one piece of a much larger capital deployment behind Nxtra Data, Airtel’s data centre subsidiary.
In April, Airtel confirmed a $1 billion investment into Nxtra, backed by Alpha Wave Global, The Carlyle Group and Anchorage Capital Group a deal that valued the subsidiary at $3.1 billion while Airtel retained its controlling stake.
While the bulk of that funding is earmarked for scaling Nxtra’s capacity in India from 300MW to 1GW, Airtel has confirmed it will also support active infrastructure builds across Africa. Nxtra’s ambitions extend further still, with a gigawatt-scale AI data centre campus in India developed alongside Google, backed by $15 billion in investment. Beyond Nairobi, Airtel has already flagged expansion plans for Lagos, Kinshasa, Mombasa, Kampala and Dar es Salaam.
If the July 2027 target holds, Nxtra’s Tatu City campus will not only reshape East Africa’s data centre landscape but position Kenya as a serious contender in the region’s race to host the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI-driven digital services.
