Kenya's iXAfrica and Atlancis Unveil East and Central Africa's First GPU-Powered AI Factory

Atlancis Technologies has switched on what it describes as East and Central Africa's first dedicated GPU-powered AI factory, hosted inside iXAfrica Data Centres' NBOX1 campus in Nairobi, marking a significant step in bringing high-performance AI compute physically onto the continent rather than routing workloads to Europe, the Gulf, or North America.

The Servernah Cloud platform, which went live on 10 November 2025, offers GPU-as-a-service infrastructure to enterprises, research institutions and AI startups across the region, addressing a bottleneck that has long constrained African AI development: the near-total absence of in-country access to the specialised graphics processing hardware required for training and running large machine learning models at scale.

### Solving the compute-access gap

Before facilities like NBOX1, East African AI teams typically had to rent GPU capacity from cloud providers based outside the continent, adding latency, cost, and data-sovereignty complications for companies handling sensitive local data — particularly in finance, healthcare and government applications. iXAfrica's Nairobi campus, built to carrier-neutral, high-density specifications, provided the power and cooling infrastructure needed to host Atlancis's GPU clusters without the retrofitting that older-generation data centres would have required.

Atlancis has positioned Servernah Cloud as infrastructure for the region's growing AI startup and research ecosystem, rather than solely for large enterprise customers, with pricing and access models aimed at lowering the barrier for smaller teams that previously could not justify the cost of overseas GPU rental. Kenyan officials have repeatedly cited local compute access as a strategic priority for the country's ambitions to be a regional AI hub, alongside its established position in mobile money and fintech innovation.

The launch adds Nairobi to a short but growing list of African cities — alongside Johannesburg and increasingly Cairo — building dedicated GPU infrastructure, as data centre operators across the continent race to capture AI-driven demand that has outpaced the colocation and cloud hosting capacity built for an earlier, less compute-intensive era of the internet.

Neither company has disclosed the initial GPU cluster's exact specifications or capacity, though both described the facility as an initial phase with room for expansion as demand grows.