Kenya’s cloud and artificial intelligence boom may be entering its most consequential phase yet, as new data suggests local consultancies, AI startups and systems integrators stand to earn dramatically more from Amazon Web Services (AWS) than previously understood.
A study by US-based research firm Omdia reveals that AWS partners worldwide can now generate “up to a $7.13 (Sh900) multiplier for every $1 (Sh130) of AWS sold,” a figure with enormous implications for East Africa’s technology ecosystem.
The report, titled “Partner Ecosystem Multiplier: The AWS Opportunity 2025,” was released on the sidelines of the AWS: Re-Invent event in Las Vegas, Nevada, which kicked off on December 1 and ends on December 5.
It reached this conclusion after Omdia conducted in-depth interviews with 35 AWS partners across various geographies and partner types.
The report’s central argument is blunt: in a region where businesses are hungry for automation, resilient infrastructure, and AI-powered customer engagement, the biggest revenue doesn’t come from selling cloud technology itself.
Instead, it comes from the advisory, design, build, adoption, and managed services wrapped around it, the same areas where Kenyan firms have sought to differentiate themselves.
“In the new era of AI, Omdia has forecasted a services opportunity tied to generative and agentic AI of $267 billion by 2030,” the research notes, positioning partners as the engines of this expansion.
With Kenya’s financial institutions, telcos, and public agencies accelerating cloud migrations, the findings sharpen the conversation about who will capture the next decade of revenue.
Kenyan companies already recognize the shift.
For years, Kenya’s cloud market has revolved around foundational migrations: moving banks off aging data centres, helping enterprises modernize digital infrastructure, or building customer-facing platforms with elasticity and scale.
But companies across Nairobi’s tech districts, from Westlands to Upper Hill to Ngong Road, are now repositioning their services for an AI-first world. The Omdia numbers help make the business case.
The report states bluntly that 82 per cent of AWS partners are now delivering some form of AI as part of their transformation delivery, a seismic shift that mirrors Kenya’s adoption pattern: AI chatbots in banking, machine learning in fraud detection, recommender engines in e-commerce, and predictive analytics in agriculture and logistics.
“Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to be the market-leading provider of public cloud infrastructure in terms of market share. For customers to unlock the full opportunities of AI in their public cloud environments, they lean on a wide variety of services and expertise from their technology providers, specifically the partners within the AWS Partner Network.”
