Kenya has shelved its flagship $1 billion data centre project backed by Microsoft and Abu Dhabi-based G42, after officials concluded the country’s power grid couldn’t support the facility at its intended scale. President William Ruto had announced the project during a state visit to Washington in May 2024, with the plan calling for a facility at KenGen’s Green Energy Park near the Olkaria geothermal fields in Naivasha — first phase at 100 megawatts, with a long-term goal of scaling to 1,000 megawatts.
Ruto later put the scale in blunt terms: the proposed facility’s power draw would have been roughly a third of Kenya’s entire installed generation capacity of about 3,000 megawatts. “To switch on that one data centre, we would need to shut off power for half the country,” he said, adding that’s when he realized there was a problem.
Power wasn’t the only sticking point — Bloomberg reported that Microsoft and G42 had asked Kenya to guarantee annual payments for a set level of cloud capacity regardless of usage, and the Treasury didn’t clear the funding. By August 2025, officials confirmed the project would miss its original May 2026 completion target. Kenya’s government insists the project isn’t dead, only paused, and says it’s targeting 10,000 megawatts of generation capacity by 2030 partly to make projects like this viable. Meanwhile, smaller-scale data centre investment in Kenya continues — Nxtra by Airtel is currently building a 44MW facility in Tatu City, expected to be one of East Africa’s largest once complete.