- Kenya says its electricity grid cannot sustain the proposed one gigawatt Microsoft plant demand
- President Ruto warns that running the project will require nationwide electricity rationing measures
- The initial phase of 100 megawatts is already straining Olkaria’s geothermal output capacity
A proposed Microsoft 1-gigawatt data center in Kenya would require so much electricity that the nation simply cannot supply 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 geothermally powered cloud region in the Olkaria area of Kenya’s Rift Valley region.
But Kenyan President William Ruto recently told an audience in Nairobi that the operation of this facility would force a dire national election.
Kenya will go dark if the data center comes up
“We will have to turn off half the country to get power to the data center,” President Ruto said.
The stark reality is that Kenya lacks enough additional megawatts for this ambitious technology project; Its entire power grid can’t even handle the plant’s huge electricity appetite.
Kenya’s total national installed capacity is between 3,000 and 3,200 megawatts from all sources combined.
Its peak electricity demand already reached 2,444 megawatts in January 2025 under 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 share from the Olkaria geothermal complex, which currently produces only 950 megawatts across all its individual power plants working together.
There is no additional capacity for such a massive new electricity user anywhere on the Kenyan grid.
No solution in sight
John Tanui, Principal Secretary in Kenya’s Ministry of Information, said Bloomberg that the project has not been formally withdrawn from consideration yet.
He claims that both parties are still discussing the project because “the scale of the data center they wanted to do still requires some structuring.”
The Kenyan government will not close half of the country to any single private facility operating within its borders.
Microsoft refuses to accept less power than its original billion-dollar plan called for for that specific location.
A separate 60-megawatt project with local developer EcoCloud remains under active discussion right now as a smaller alternative, but the $1 billion Olkaria proposal has stalled due to capacity disagreements and a lack of electrical infrastructure in 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 Kenya project “the single biggest step forward” for digital technology in the country’s history — but a step that requires a third of a nation’s electricity may not be a real step forward for Kenyan citizens.
A data center cannot be called progressive if it requires every other user to turn off their lights.
Nearly half of US data center construction this year has been delayed or canceled due to power shortages – and if Western economies are canceling data centers due to power shortages, Africa, with its growing infrastructure needs, is probably not a region for power-hungry data center projects.
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