Dan Kwach comes home to build Africa’s AI data centres

The fault was not his company’s. Dan Kwach, then a young network engineer at Kenya Data Networks, had traced the outage at a diplomat’s home to the customer’s side of the line. It was the kind of failure he saw again and again: a cable pulled loose from a computer, a backup battery run flat. He explained this to the ambassador’s son.

The boy was unmoved. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Your service is still down.”

Kwach told that story to FINTAK in January 2025, when he was running Africa Data Centres’ business in East Africa. He still works by it. Customers do not pay for an explanation. They pay for a service that works.

On 6 October 2026 the same rule found a bigger client. Kwach announced on LinkedIn that he was back home at Africa Data Centres, the data centre arm of Strive Masiyiwa’s Cassava Technologies, as its executive for AI data centres. The service that must not go down is now the computing power behind artificial intelligence. “We either get a seat on the table when this assessment is happening,” he said, “or be on the menu as a continent.”

Trenches on Nairobi’s roads.

His second lesson came with a shovel. In his telling, Kenya Data Networks was the first privately run network in a market where Kenya Posts and Telecommunications had been the only one, and the first operator to lay fibre. As its crews dug up Nairobi’s roads, the press accused the company of destroying public infrastructure. Customers were happy with wireless and could not see the point of the trenches.

The engineers had to stop talking about technology and start talking about money: what fibre would save a business. Kwach took a habit from it. “Always asking yourself ‘why’ is important,” he told FINTAK. “Why do I show up at work? Why is this technology important?”

Selling sleep.

Kenya Data Networks became part of Masiyiwa’s Liquid group, and its data centre business grew into Africa Data Centres. Kwach was data centre manager at the start. He helped design, build and sell its first facilities and rose to run East Africa. Along the way he earned an MSc in information technology from the University of Liverpool and became an Uptime Institute Accredited Tier Specialist.

His Nairobi base, NBO1, sits in Sameer Business Park on Mombasa Road: four data halls, 7.5 megawatts of site capacity and an Uptime Institute Tier III certification. Asked what the building sells, he rejected the industry’s word for it. “We don’t sell colocation,” he told FINTAK. The product, he said, was reliability, trust and peace of mind, for less than a company would spend building its own.

That promise is also what keeps him awake. “That customers can sleep because they expect that I am not sleeping,” he said. Then he added the other reason: “My family also keeps me awake at night because they look forward to seeing me at the end of the day.”

He names Working Backwards, by the former Amazon executives Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, as a favourite book, and his creed is short: progress over perfection, and move before the window closes.

Five kilowatts.

The window he was watching in January 2025 was AI. A conventional server rack, he explained, draws about five kilowatts. AI equipment crams many times that power into the same floor space, and it had forced the company to rethink how data centres are built. Africa Data Centres had room in Nairobi to grow to about 20 megawatts, he said, and he wanted that space ready for AI, not only for the big cloud companies.

He did not want the company to be only a landlord for other people’s AI. He wanted to talk about what the technology could do for Africa’s own problems in health, food security and climate. Asked about opportunities no one had yet taken, he went further. “If there’s one thing I pray for,” he said, it is a fully digital election “that all stakeholders can trust”. He laughed as he said it.

Antananarivo.

In December 2025 Kwach announced that he was leaving after 19 years. “Nitawamiss (I will miss you) is an understatement,” he wrote. A week later he surfaced in Antananarivo as deputy chief executive of STELLARIX, a carrier-neutral data centre and cloud company owned by AXIAN Telecom.

Behind him, his old company was being rearranged. In January 2026 Cassava said it was not selling Africa Data Centres. In February, South Africa’s Competition Tribunal cleared STANLIB, the Standard Bank-backed asset manager, to take joint control of its South African unit. The group now ran nine data centres in six countries for about 400 customers.

The AI plan he had described went ahead without him. Cassava and Nvidia announced what they called Africa’s first AI factory in 2025, starting with 3,000 GPUs in South Africa. By May 2026 Cassava was planning a 20-megawatt AI factory in Johannesburg, with Nigeria and Kenya named as the next markets and Egypt and Morocco under study. In January 2025, Kwach had told FINTAK the company was eyeing Cairo and Casablanca.

Madagascar lasted less than a year. He has said it taught him about different cultures and confirmed that African markets want the same things.

Technology in jelly form.

The Nairobi he has come back to is more crowded. iXAfrica raised financing from Rand Merchant Bank in September 2025 to add 20 megawatts to its campus, built for AI racks of up to 40 kilowatts. The $1bn geothermal data centre that Microsoft and G42 announced for Olkaria in 2024 has stalled over the capacity payments Microsoft wanted guaranteed, though officials say talks continue. The government published a national AI strategy in March 2025.

The attacks have multiplied too. When FINTAK interviewed him, the latest Communications Authority count was 855 million threats aimed at Kenya’s critical information infrastructure in the year to June 2023. In 2025/26 the authority detected 11.1 billion threat events, up 29% from 8.6 billion the year before. Those are attempts detected, not breaches confirmed.

The law has struggled to keep up. In October 2025 a court suspended key sections of Kenya’s amended cybercrime law within weeks of the president signing it. It was the pattern Kwach had described. “Technology is in a jelly form,” he told FINTAK. It needs time to be understood before it can be regulated, he argued, so regulation will always trail it, and rules written too early stifle innovation.

The other boy.

The achievement he talks about least, he told FINTAK, is one he did not know he had. A high-school classmate, now a teacher, got in touch about a pupil who had named Kwach as the person he wanted to become. “Dan, you have a boy here who would like to be like you.”

Kwach had not known anyone was watching. It taught him that people can be role models without knowing it, and that he must not fail the people who look up to him. One boy told him his service was down. Another wanted to be like him. Between them sits the rule he gave FINTAK: “Don’t talk about values. Show them.”