East Africa’s Push for an AI Boom Takes Center Stage at GITEX in Nairobi Kenya
Kenya’s first Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region will be hosted in Nairobi. iXAfrica Data Centres confirmed on Wednesday.In the headline announcement of day two of AI EVERYTHING KENYA X GITEX KENYA 2026 at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre (KICC).
The partnership between iXAfrica, East Africa’s first hyperscale AI-ready data centre operator, and Oracle marks a significant expansion of cloud infrastructure on the continent. iXAfrica CEO Snehar Shah said,“For Kenya and East Africa, this is a strategic shift. Local cloud and data centre infrastructure strengthens data residency, improves resilience, and supports lower-latency digital services.”
The announcement came as the three-day event, organised by inD in partnership with Kenya’s Office of the Special Envoy on Technology, entered its expo phase. Moreover the event had more than 280 enterprises and startups from 75 countries exhibiting at KICC. The event attracted 100 investors managing a combined US$50 billion in assets under management.
A high-level panel hosted by Kenyan digital innovation firm Qhala and Open Society Foundations confronted a persistent structural challenge. Themed; Africa accounts for less than one percent of global data center capacity. Africa is frontier AI models are predominantly trained on non-African datasets. The continent’s AI market is projected to reach US$16.5 billion by 2030 from US$4.5 billion today.
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“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, Founder and CEO of Qhala. She called for urgent investment in compute infrastructure localized data systems, and energy-efficient data centers. Africa risks structural dependency on external digital ecosystems.
Redington, the US$11.8 billion technology distribution group, said its East Africa business is moving beyond hardware resale. “Real value creation is coming from advisory, integration, cybersecurity, and managed services.” said Serkan Çelik, the company’s CEO for Turkey, Africa, Egypt, and the CIS region.
Launchpad For Consumer Tech
The event also served as a launchpad for consumer tech. London-founded smartphone and audio brand Nothing announcing its full product range entry into the Kenyan market.. They will venture in the country through a distribution partnership with Mitsumi. Nothing, which bills itself as the only new smartphone brand to emerge globally in the last decade, said Kenya would be the springboard for a broader East African rollout covering Uganda, Rwanda, and West Africa.
The event concludes on Thursday with the Venture Scaling Forum and the Supernova Challenge, the region’s largest startup pitch competition.
