- Kenya says its power grid cannot meet Microsoft’s proposed demand for gigawatt installations.
- President Ruto warns commissioning of project would require nationwide power rationing measures
- Initial 100-megawatt phase already strains Olkaria’s geothermal production capacity
A one-gigawatt Microsoft data center project in Kenya would require so much electricity that the country simply couldn’t provide that power.
Microsoft and Abu Dhabi-based G42 announced the project in May 2024 during President Ruto’s official visit to Washington DC, promising a geothermal-powered cloud region in the Olkaria region of Kenya’s Rift Valley region.
However, Kenyan President William Ruto recently told a hearing in Nairobi that running the facility would force a dire national choice.
Kenya goes dark if data center appears
“Half the country would have to be turned off for the data center to be powered,” President Ruto said.
The harsh reality is that Kenya lacks enough megawatts available for this ambitious technology project; its entire power grid can’t even meet the facility’s enormous power appetite.
Kenya’s total installed national capacity is between 3,000 and 3,200 megawatts from all sources.
Its peak electricity demand has already reached 2,444 megawatts in January 2025, during regular daily use across the country, meaning a full 1 gigawatt data center would consume about a third of the country’s total power supply.
Even the first 100-megawatt phase would drain a significant portion of the Olkaria geothermal complex, which currently produces only 950 megawatts through all of its individual power plants working together.
No additional capacity exists for such a massive new electricity user on the Kenyan grid.
No solution in sight
John Tanui, Principal Secretary of Kenya’s Ministry of Information, said Bloomberg that the project has not yet been officially withdrawn from study.
He says the two parties are still discussing the project, because “the scale of the data center they wanted to achieve still requires some structuring.”
The Kenyan government will not shut down half the country for the benefit of a single private facility operating within its borders.
Microsoft refuses to accept less energy than its original billion-dollar plan called for for this specific location.
A separate 60-megawatt project with local developer EcoCloud currently remains in active discussion as a smaller alternative, but Olkaria’s main $1 billion proposal is stalled due to disagreements over capacity and the absence of power infrastructure across Kenya.
Microsoft spent $1.5 billion on the G42 in 2024 after the G42 agreed to remove Huawei equipment under US pressure.
Microsoft President Brad Smith called the Kenyan project “the biggest step forward” for digital technology in the country’s history. However, a step that requires a third of a country’s electricity may not be a real step forward for Kenyan citizens.
A data center cannot be called progressive if it forces all other users to turn off their lights.
Nearly half of U.S. data center construction this year has been delayed or canceled due to power shortages — and if Western economies are canceling their data centers due to power shortages, Africa, with its growing infrastructure needs, is probably not a region for energy-intensive data center projects.
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