iXAfrica Data Centres will host Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s first East African region in Nairobi, the company confirmed Wednesday on day two of the AI Everything Kenya x GITEX Kenya conference at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre.
The partnership gives Kenyan and East African businesses their first access to Oracle’s enterprise cloud services from a local facility. Until now, Oracle customers in the region — large banks, insurers, and government agencies running Oracle databases and ERP systems — had to route workloads to European or Middle Eastern OCI regions, adding latency and complicating compliance with Kenya’s Data Protection Act. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure covers managed databases, analytics, and enterprise application hosting; a Nairobi node means that data generated and consumed in East Africa stays in East Africa. iXAfrica CEO Snehar Shah described the change: “Local cloud and data centre infrastructure strengthens data residency, improves resilience, and supports lower-latency digital services.”
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The announcement came during a conference that drew 280 enterprises and startups from 75 countries to Nairobi, alongside 100 investors managing a combined $50 billion in assets under management. A panel co-hosted by Kenyan digital firm Qhala and the Open Society Foundations put the structural gap in numbers: Africa holds less than 1% of global data centre capacity, even as the continent’s AI market is projected to grow from $4.5 billion today to $16.5 billion by 2030. “Africa is at a strategic crossroads: it can either remain a dependent consumer of foreign AI or emerge as a sovereign architect of its own digital future,” said Dr. Shikoh Gitau, Qhala’s founder and CEO.
Also announced at GITEX Kenya: London-based smartphone brand Nothing confirmed its full Kenyan market entry through a distribution deal with Mitsumi, with Uganda, Rwanda, and West Africa slated to follow.
Enterprise cloud adoption in Kenya has moved slowest in regulated sectors — banking, insurance, government — precisely because data-sovereignty rules make it difficult to host sensitive workloads abroad. Kenya’s Data Protection Act, enforced by the Office of the Data Commissioner since 2022, requires organisations to get explicit authorisation before transferring personal data out of the country. An OCI region in Nairobi removes the need for that transfer entirely. The effect extends across the region: businesses in Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Rwanda that run Oracle databases or ERP systems will be able to use a regional node rather than routing traffic to Europe. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure regions also typically unlock local support and billing, which matters for public-sector and financial-services clients that require it as a procurement condition. For cloud vendors evaluating East Africa, the iXAfrica partnership signals that local data centre infrastructure is now mature enough to host hyperscaler-tier requirements. GITEX Kenya concludes Thursday with the Venture Scaling Forum and the Supernova Challenge startup pitch competition.
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