Dan Kwach returns to Cassava Technologies to lead AI data

Dan Kwach has returned to Africa Data Centers (ADC), the data center business of Cassava Technologies, taking on the role of Executive for AI Data Centers. His return to Nairobi follows a brief departure in December 2025, when he joined STELLARIX in Madagascar as Deputy CEO Holding. Less than a year later, he is back leading ADC’s push into artificial intelligence infrastructure. He announced the move on LinkedIn, expressing his happiness to be back home in Nairobi.

Career Roots and Brief Detour

Kwach began his career at Kenya Data Networks in 2006, which later became Liquid Telecom Kenya and eventually part of the ADC group. Over nearly two decades, he rose through the ranks, becoming managing director for East Africa in 2021. In that role, he oversaw the construction 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 spent about 19 years with the group before stepping away.

His stint at STELLARIX, a carrier-neutral Tier III data center and cloud company under AXIAN Telecom, gave him exposure to operations outside East Africa. However, he said the experience reinforced his belief that technology challenges and user expectations are consistent across the continent, and that the sector’s problems are the same everywhere.

Building AI-Ready Infrastructure

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.

Unanswered Questions and Local Impact

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.