KenGen, the parastatal in Kenya responsible for producing a majority of the country’s electric power is planning to setup a data center as an additional revenue stream.
Tender documents posted this month outlined the parastatal’s request for consultancy services for a KenGen Commercial Tier IV data center that they are planning to setup.
A tier 4 data center is an enterprise class data center is the most advanced type of data center tier with redundant and dual powered instances for the servers, storage, network and cooling. Tier 4 data centers guarantee 99.995% uptime.
This is part of their Good 2 Great transformation strategy where one of the objectives is to diversify its business portfolio and introduce non-generation projects.
“Given the increasingly digital nature of modern businesses and all the emerging possibilities including Cloud, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, IoT and Big Data Analytics; KenGen wants to set up a colocation data center in Kenya to address this growing need in the market. This would be a world class hyper-scale facility to provide unrivalled service for the African market,” KenGen says in the tender document.
KenGen intends to build this Tier IV Data Center that can host mission critical systems and provide colocation, business continuity and manage services facilities to local and international organizations.
KenGen has been making strides to diversify their revenue streams. In August this year, they said that they were planning to roll out electric car charging infrastructure. Electric car industry is still in its infancy and the parastatal wants to take advantage of that. Their new foray to the data center business comes months after it was announced that phase one of the Konza National Data Center is complete.
