Kenya wants a licence built specifically for data centres, and operators have 30 days to weigh in

Right now, a commercial data centre in Kenya is regulated the same way as a broader category of telecoms infrastructure.

The Communications Authority of Kenya wants to change that.

The proposal

The CA has opened a 30-day public consultation on creating a standalone Data Centre licence, in a notice signed by Director General David Mugonyi.

Currently, co-location data centres sit inside the Network Facilities Provider Tier 2 category, a framework not originally designed with data centres specifically in mind. Under the proposal, operators providing co-location services and related support services would instead fall under a dedicated licence built around what data centres actually do.

The CA says the goal is clearer regulatory visibility, support for continued infrastructure investment, and closer alignment with how comparable jurisdictions handle the sector.

This has been building for over a year

This isn't a sudden move. It's the latest step in a review process the CA has been running since early 2025.

The Authority published its first consultation document on Kenya's telecommunications market structure in January 2025, gathered feedback, published its responses in September 2025, held a validation workshop, and finalised a Revised Telecommunications Market Structure in June 2026. That revision placed data centres within the NFP-Tier 1 and Tier 2 categories for the first time as a formal matter.

The current proposal goes a step further: instead of fitting data centres inside a broader network infrastructure licence, they would get one designed around their specific operations.

What operators should actually do

Stakeholders and members of the public have 30 days from the notice's publication to submit written comments, either electronically or by post to the Director General's office in Nairobi.

The proposal doesn't become binding regulation immediately. It has to go through the consultation period and the CA's subsequent regulatory process first.

The tecMAMBO take

Regulatory consultations rarely make for exciting headlines, but this one lands at a specific moment. Nairobi has just added fresh data centre capacity through Digital Realty's NBO2 launch, and the country is actively pitching itself as East Africa's cloud and AI infrastructure hub.

A licensing category built specifically for data centres, rather than one borrowed from general telecoms regulation, is the kind of unglamorous groundwork that actually determines whether that pitch holds up under scrutiny from large enterprise and hyperscale customers. Investors evaluating where to build next tend to look past marketing language and straight at how clearly a jurisdiction's rules are written. Kenya appears to be trying to close that gap before it becomes a competitive disadvantage rather than after.