There is a database that knows what Africa intends to build over the next decade, and almost nobody in the Kenyan data centre conversation has ever queried it. The African Infrastructure Database (AID), maintained by AUDA-NEPAD, the African Union's development agency, is the continental registry behind the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA). It tracks every serious cross-border infrastructure project on the continent: ports, railways, power pools, pipelines, water systems and, crucially for our beat, the digital layer. Its public API is open, keyed, and (as of 8 September 2026, when we pulled Kenya's records) browsable from right here on DC254.
What we found reframes Kenya's infrastructure story in two directions at once. The registry confirms Kenya as the corridor economy of East Africa: the Mombasa–Nairobi spine appears again and again in continental-scale projects. And it contains a project most Kenyan data centre coverage has never mentioned: a $395 million regional smart hub with data centre capacity, registered at Mombasa, being developed as a public-private partnership under PIDA's second Priority Action Plan (PAP 2).
The headline numbers
Kenya's registry holds 186 projects with roughly US$172 billion in registered capex across four sectors (transport, energy, water and ICT) as of our 8 September 2026 fetch. The public endpoint serves the first 100 records per request; within that slice, transport dominates (42 projects, including the continental flagship: the $19.2 billion Mombasa–Nairobi–Malaba–Kampala–Kigali standard-gauge railway programme), followed by water (41) and energy (12), with five ICT-sector projects. Status labels are registry-speak: 89 of the 100 carried "Active", nine "Completed", two unlabelled.
The completed list is a reminder of what "infrastructure" means at continental scale: the $5 billion Mombasa–Nairobi SGR section, the Nairobi Southern Bypass, the Mombasa Port new container terminal, the Malaba one-stop border post. These are the corridors and gateways that every Kenyan data centre's diesel, turbines, and fibre drums travel on, and they are the context investors mean when they call Kenya "the logistics hub of East Africa".
The ICT projects: Kenya's registered digital pipeline
Five ICT projects appear in the served slice, and they sketch a coherent strategy: Kenya as the digital gateway for its landlocked and coastal neighbours.
The flagship: "Transborder Submarine Fiber PoPs, Regional Smart Hub Facility and Data Centre" (PIDA I.02.30.05, US$395 million, Active). Registered at Mombasa: the coordinates land in the Miritini area, home to Digital Realty's MBA1, the most interconnected building on the Kenyan coast, the project is coordinated by the EAC and IGAD under the IGAD Regional Infrastructure Masterplan and is being advanced as a PPP under PIDA PAP 2, serving six countries (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia). Read carefully: this is a project preparation, at Project Structuring stage as of the 2024 milestone, not a construction site. But a continental registry explicitly reserving data centre capacity at Mombasa, in a PPP wrapper with six-country backing, is a signal of institutional intent that no local market report captures. If it proceeds, it would stack regional data centre demand directly onto the cable-landing geography where seven live submarine cable systems surface (nine in total).
The Juba–Nairobi Fiber Optic Link (PIDA I.02.30.06, US$45 million). The Kenyan segment (roughly 700 km, part of the national NOFBI fibre backbone) is already operational. The South Sudanese side has been delayed by security and financing; the registry notes the August 2023 Ruto–Kiir memorandum that revived it. For Nairobi's data centre operators, this is landlocked-demand plumbing: every kilometre of completed South Sudanese fibre is a new customer for Kenyan colocation and transit.
Two Somalia cross-border links: Garissa–Kismayo and Nairobi–Mogadishu, each with a point of presence at the Somali end, registered without capex figures. These are the northern extension of the same strategy, Kenyan fibre and Kenyan hubs anchoring neighbouring markets' connectivity.
The DARE1 registry record, the Djibouti Africa Regional Express submarine cable (4,763 km, landings including Mombasa), which carries a useful lesson in data quality: the registry's summary cites a 60 Tbit/s system design, while the conservative per-landing figure we carry on our cable layer is 0.96 Tbit/s. Both derive from the cable's documentation at different moments and scopes; we publish the divergence rather than silently picking one, and cross-check against TeleGeography's live map before making capacity claims.
The power entry that matters to every data centre
One energy registry entry deserves special attention from our readers: the ZTK Transmission Interconnector, Kenya section (PIDA E.02.03.02, US$50 million, Active), the Kenyan segment of the Zambia–Tanzania–Kenya 400 kV interconnector, Kenya's bridge into the Southern African Power Pool via the Eastern Africa Power Pool. Why does a transmission line belong in data centre coverage? Because the binding constraint on Kenyan digital infrastructure is not demand, land, or capital, it is the grid's ability to deliver tens of megawatts to a single site, the exact problem that has the Microsoft–G42 Olkaria project reported paused since May 2026. Interconnectors turn a national grid with a ~2.3% reserve margin into a regional one that can trade surpluses and shortfalls; every megawatt of traded capacity is a megawatt of data centre demand that becomes servable. Registry entries like ZTK are the unglamorous plumbing behind every "Kenya is open for AI" headline.
The same logic runs in reverse: the LAPSSET corridor projects (the $3 billion crude pipeline entry, the $13.5 billion railway) and the SGR programme define where coastal power, fibre and logistics will thicken over the next decade. Data centre siting in Kenya is corridor-adjacent by history, Mombasa Road exists because the highway and the fibre do, and the registry shows where the next thickening happens.
How to use a registry responsibly
The PIDA layer is now live on our infrastructure map: violet diamonds, separate from the facility markers, with the full project table beneath. Three rules govern how we use this data, and how you should:
First, a registry entry is not a facility. "Active" in registry-speak means the project is in the continental pipeline, it may be at feasibility, structuring, or financing stage. The Mombasa smart hub's 2024 milestone was Project Structuring. Counting registry entries as built infrastructure is how continental "Africa's data centre boom" listicles end up doubling capacity that exists only in project documents. Our DC Directory and the PIDA layer are deliberately separate datasets that never share a sum.
Second, registry numbers are the registrant's own. Capex, capacity, and coordinates are published as registered, without independent verification, the DARE1 divergence above is the live example. We republish them dated and attributed, not confirmed. Where a registry claim can be checked against an independent source (PeeringDB, operator pages, cable maps), we note the comparison.
Third, the gaps are informative. Kenya's registry holds 186 projects, but only five in ICT, a ratio that itself tells a story about where continental attention sits versus where Kenya's private digital investment actually flows. The market briefs and private capital documents we cover elsewhere (the Xalam/D4D Hub briefing, the EU–Kenya Digital Dialogue) describe a digital economy that the continental registry barely sketches. Reading both together, the public pipeline and the verified market, is the closest thing this sector has to a full picture.
The API is public and keyed; our fetches are dated and repeatable. Expect this layer to be refreshed with each quarterly directory pass, and expect the same discipline here that governs everything else on this site: named sources, fetch dates, divergences published.