Dan Kwach has returned to Africa Data Centers (ADC), the data center business of Cassava Technologies, less than a year after leaving. His new title is Executive for AI Data Centers. He announced it on LinkedIn, and he says he is happy to be back home in Nairobi.
Kwach joined Kenya Data Networks in 2006. That company later became Liquid Telecom Kenya and eventually part of the ADC group. He spent about 19 years with the group.
In 2021 he became managing director for East Africa. During that time he oversaw the build of what was described as East Africa’s first Uptime Institute-accredited Tier III data center, in Nairobi, and helped launch the ADC East Africa brand.
He left in December 2025 for Madagascar, where he became Deputy CEO Holding at STELLARIX, a carrier-neutral Tier III data center and cloud company that belongs to AXIAN Telecom.
His time there was short, but he says it convinced him that people across Africa want the same things from technology, and that the sector’s problems are the same everywhere.
Return to ADC
His mandate now is to build and run data centers designed for AI workloads. These differ from ordinary hosting facilities in three ways:
- They draw far more electricity per rack.
- They need advanced cooling, including liquid cooling in some designs.
- They are filled with GPUs, chips that run many calculations at the same time.
Cassava’s plan is built around what it calls an AI factory, developed with Nvidia. It is a data center packed with GPUs and the software to use them. Two kinds of work happen there.
Training is when a model learns from data. Inference is when a trained model answers a question or makes a prediction. Cassava wants to sell access to this computing power as a service, so developers can use the hardware without building their own facility.
South Africa is first. Egypt, Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria were named as the next markets.
ADC already runs NBO1 in Nairobi, at Sameer Industrial Park. Its facility page lists four data halls and 7.5 MW of available site capacity. That figure describes the whole site. It does not say how much is set aside for AI, or whether any GPUs are installed.
That is the gap in the story. Kwach’s announcement gave no budget, no commissioning date for Kenya, no customer pricing, and no list of the facilities he will oversee.
Cassava’s expansion plans include Kenya but come with no Kenyan launch date. A Kenyan company that wants to run AI work locally cannot yet plan around this. It needs to know when capacity arrives and what it costs.
Dan Kwach argues that technology investment in Africa should serve local economic priorities: enterprise growth, sustainability, security, trade, jobs and productivity.
READ: Data Centers, Petrodollars and the Price of Building the AI Age
On who controls AI infrastructure, he is blunt. Africa either has a seat at the table when these decisions are made, or it ends up on the menu.
The commercial point underneath is simple. Many African businesses want to use AI in finance, health, agriculture, logistics and government services.
If the computing happens outside the continent, they depend on foreign capacity and international network links, and much of the value goes with it.
Dan Kwach has the experience to build this in Nairobi. What has not been announced is when, and at what price.
