Kenya Electric Generating Company (KenGen) has revealed its plans to build a commercial data centre. This is mean to be used for housing servers, network, and storage systems of local and international companies. This will be done at a fee as the government parastatal looks to diversify its source of revenue.

The Kenyan sole power producer will be seeking a consultant of global stature to help guide the project in terms of feasibility study, design and certification.

KenGen’s latest tender documents reveal that the chosen consultant will meet with the data centre’s stakeholders. They will then have to pick a location of the land as well as determine the necessary requirements.

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“KenGen plans to build a new Tier IV Data Centre that can host mission-critical systems and provide colocation, business continuity and managed services facilities to local and international organizations; as an additional and diversified revenue stream,” says the firm in tender documents.

The prospective consultant will also be tasked with providing the centre’s architectural design and technical details. This includes power, cooling, physical security, cabling, communication and fire protection civil works.

The list of targeted customers will include firms that store large amounts of data and have to depend on the integrity of the store data for internal and external operations.

Additionally, this project is part of a bigger effort by KenGen to broaden its revenue streams from the traditional business of producing electricity and selling to Kenya Power for national supply.

Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and more are not new to this as they have their own huge data centres used for advanced computing and information storage. So it wouldn’t be a surprise to see KenGen try to reach out to such firms as potential consultants.