INFRASTRUCTURE
A Nigerian cloud provider opens its first Nairobi zone
Nobus Cloud Services, run out of Lagos by Nkponani Limited, has switched on Nobus-EA-AZ1, its first East African availability zone, and paired it with a Catalyst Programme offering free credits and technical support to African startups and enterprises. The pitch against the hyperscalers is shilling pricing, in-country storage and lower latency — which lands squarely on the Data Protection Act's limits on shipping personal data abroad and regulators' data-residency demands. It arrives into a crowded month: Digital Realty's 6.4MW NBO2, Oracle preparing a cloud region, and Airtel Kenya building toward July 2027. A zone that is live is not yet a zone that is loaded.
CIO Africa
INFRASTRUCTURE
Digital Parks Africa adds a Tier IV carrier-neutral build in Lagos
NDC1 is Digital Parks Africa's West African expansion, targeting Uptime Institute Tier IV certification and pitched at cloud, fintech and data-heavy workloads in Nigeria. The company, led by founder and CEO Menno Parsons, has operated in the country for more than two decades. Size in megawatts, investment and a construction timeline have not been published — the same gap that makes several of this month's African data-centre announcements hard to rank against each other.
TechTrends KE
STARTUPS
Siemens puts its industrial software into six African markets through Redington
Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Morocco, Egypt and Tanzania get distribution and local support for Teamcenter, Designcenter and Simcenter — product lifecycle management, design and simulation — plus Siemens' digital twin and industrial AI tooling, with more markets promised. Redington handles the regional channel. The target is manufacturers and engineering firms that have mostly been priced or supported out of this class of software; pricing and access terms were not disclosed, which is the detail Kenyan manufacturers will want before anyone celebrates.
TechTrends KE
STARTUPS
ODIGO brings field-team tracking to African distributors
Built by TalentBridge Technologies and brought into Africa by ASK Tech Ventures after deployments across South and Southeast Asia, ODIGO CMS folds planning, workforce management, field activity tracking, evidence capture and reporting into one system. The pitch is aimed at anyone running sales reps, promoters, merchandisers or field agents across scattered locations — retail execution, brand activations, merchandising, audits. "As businesses scale, the distance between the person making decisions and the person executing them becomes a real management challenge," says ASK Tech CEO Vikas Mehta. Pricing was not disclosed.
TechTrends KE
AI
Gemini gets a Windows desktop app, five months after the Mac one
Google's desktop Gemini is now a free download for Windows 10 and 11 on x64 and ARM64, with an Alt+Space overlay, a sidebar carrying Notebooks and chat history, Gmail and Drive integration, image generation via Nano Banana, video via Omni, and server-side task automation through Spark. The paid tiers run KES 900 and KES 3,700 a month in Kenya. Spark is unavailable in the EEA, Switzerland, the UK — and Nigeria, a reminder that the regional carve-outs on these tools are not always the ones you would predict. The macOS version shipped in April.
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