{"id":581178,"date":"2026-05-13T05:58:25","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T05:58:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/581178\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T05:58:25","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T05:58:25","slug":"microsofts-massive-kenya-ai-data-center-would-require-switching-off-half-the-country-to-meet-power-requirements-government-says-1-billion-project-stalls-over-capacity-disagreements-and","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/581178\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft’s massive Kenya AI data center would require switching off ‘half the country’ to meet power requirements, government says \u2014 $1 billion project stalls over capacity disagreements and lack of infrastructure"},"content":{"rendered":"

A $1 billion data center that Microsoft<\/a> and Abu Dhabi-based AI firm G42 planned to build in Kenya has stalled after the Kenyan government failed to meet Microsoft’s demand for guaranteed annual capacity payments, Bloomberg<\/a> reported Sunday. Kenyan President William Ruto put the scale of the project’s power requirements into clear terms at a recent state event in Nairobi, saying the country would need to “switch off half the country” to keep the facility running.<\/p>\n

The project, announced in May 2024 during Ruto\u2019s visit to Washington, was supposed to bring a geothermal-powered data center to the Olkaria region in Kenya’s Rift Valley. G42 was to lead construction, with the facility running Microsoft Azure in a new East Africa cloud region. The first phase targeted 100 megawatts of capacity and was expected to be operational by this year, with a long-term goal of scaling to 1 gigawatt.<\/p>\n

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President Ruto isn\u2019t exaggerating about shutting off half the country\u2019s power. Kenya\u2019s total installed electricity capacity sits between 3,000 and 3,200 megawatts, and peak demand reached a record 2,444 megawatts in January, according to data from KenGen, the country\u2019s government-owned electricity producer.<\/p>\n

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The full 1 gigawatt build would therefore have consumed roughly a third of the country\u2019s total capacity, and even the first 100 megawatts would have required a significant share of the Olkaria geothermal complex’s output, which currently generates around 950MW across all its plants.<\/p>\n

John Tanui, principal secretary at Kenya’s Ministry of Information, told Bloomberg that the project hasn\u2019t been withdrawn and that talks are continuing, adding that the \u201cscale of the data center they [Microsoft] wanted to do still requires some structuring.\u201d A separate 60-megawatt project with local developer EcoCloud is also still under discussion.<\/p>\n

Kenya\u2019s Microsoft campus was set to be the first facility that Microsoft and G42 built together after Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in G42 back in 2024. That deal followed G42’s agreement to divest from Chinese holdings and strip Huawei equipment from its systems under pressure from Washington. Microsoft President Brad Smith joined G42’s board as part of the arrangement and described the Kenya project at the time as the \u201csingle biggest step forward\u201d for digital technology in the country’s history.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Huawei is expanding its presence in Kenya, having launched a new fiber broadband service with Safaricom, Kenya\u2019s largest telecom operator, last week. Africa currently hosts roughly 1% of the world’s data center capacity.<\/p>\n

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Microsoft is spending $190 billion on capex in 2026<\/a>, and the company adds approximately 1 gigawatt of data center capacity every three months globally. But power constraints are proving to be a universal bottleneck: nearly half of planned U.S. data center builds this year have been delayed or canceled<\/a> due to shortages of electrical infrastructure.<\/p>\n

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Follow Tom’s Hardware on Google News<\/a>, or add us as a preferred source<\/a>, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A $1 billion data center that Microsoft and Abu Dhabi-based AI firm G42 planned to build in Kenya…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":581179,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-581178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/581179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}