Software King of the World: Microsoft’s $1 billion Kenyan AI data centre has stalled because someone realised that powering it up would apparently mean switching off half the country.
Kenyan President William Ruto spelt out the problem at a recent state event in Nairobi.
“We would need to switch off half the country for the data centre to be powered,” Ruto said.
The project was announced in May 2024 during Ruto’s visit to Washington. It was meant to bring a geothermal-powered data centre to the Olkaria region in Kenya’s Rift Valley, with G42 leading construction and Vole’s Azure running in a new East Africa cloud region.
The first phase was aimed at 100MW of capacity and was supposed to be operating this year. The long-term plan was to scale the site to 1GW.
Kenya’s installed electricity capacity sits between 3,000MW and 3,200MW, while peak demand hit a record 2,444MW in January, according to KenGen, the country’s state-owned electricity producer. The full 1GW build would have eaten roughly a third of Kenya’s total capacity.
Even the first 100MW phase would have taken a chunky share of the Olkaria geothermal complex’s output, which generates about 950MW across its plants.
Kenya’s Ministry of Information principal secretary, John Tanui, told Bloomberg that the project had not been withdrawn and that talks were continuing.
Tanui said the “scale of the data centre they [Microsoft] wanted to do still requires some structuring.”
A separate 60MW project with the local developer EcoCloud is still under discussion. The Kenyan campus was meant to be the first facility built by Vole and G42 after Redmond put $1.5 billion into the Abu Dhabi firm in 2024.
That deal followed G42 agreeing to ditch Chinese holdings and rip Huawei kit from its systems after Washington applied the usual friendly pressure.
The problem is not just in Africa. Nearly half of the planned US data centre builds this year have reportedly been delayed or cancelled due to shortages of electrical infrastructure.
