A new data centre is about to open in Kenya, courtesy of PAIX Data Centres, an African provider of cloud and carrier-neutral colocation data centre services.
According to local press reports, PAIX (Pan African Internet Exchange data centres) plans to open the facility – called PAIX Nairobi-1 – at Britam Tower, the capital’s tallest office building, in Upper Hill, Nairobi’s financial district, in November.
There is, apparently, a strategic reason for this. The company has suggested that the office facilities of Britam Tower make the location attractive for international customers that are considering opening offices in Nairobi and points out that it gives them proximity and access to critical data infrastructure.
Nairobi-1 will host 240 cabinets with a total power capacity of 1.5MVA, 690 square metres of whitespace, and a guaranteed uptime of 99.982 percent, making the site highly suitable, PAIX says, for its interconnected customer community of internet service providers, telecom operators, cloud providers, content distribution networks, digital media and enterprises.
PAIX’s data centre project in Kenya is supported by the Dutch government via the Dutch Good Growth Fund, providing PAIX’s data centre projects with long-term growth financing.
PAIX was founded in 2016 by a team of data centre, telecom industry and investment professionals with a track record in the African market. In its data centre operations, PAIX aims to offer a leading global quality service level to its national and international customer base across the African continent.
In Ghana, its other major market to date, PAIX operates the country's leading carrier-neutral data centre with the highest concentration of networks. Known locally as RackAfrica, it is situated in Accra.