- Kenya says its power grid cannot sustain Microsoft facility’s proposed one-gigawatt demand
- President Ruto warns that promoting the project would require national electricity rationing measures
- The initial phase of 100 megawatts already tests Olkaria’s geothermal production capacity
A proposed 1 gigawatt Microsoft data center in Kenya would demand so much electricity that the nation simply could not 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 geothermal-powered cloud region in the Olkaria area in Kenya’s Rift Valley region.
However, Kenyan President William Ruto recently told an audience in Nairobi that running this facility would force a terrible national decision.
Kenya shuts down if data center appears
“We would have to take half the country offline for the data center to work,” President Ruto said.
The stark reality is that Kenya lacks enough additional megawatts for this ambitious technological project; Its entire electrical grid can’t even support the facility’s enormous electrical appetite.
Kenya’s total national installed capacity is between 3,000 and 3,200 megawatts from all sources combined.
Its peak electricity demand has already reached 2,444 megawatts in January 2025, during regular daily use across the country, meaning that an entire 1 gigawatt data center would consume about a third of the country’s total electricity supply.
Even the first phase of 100 megawatts would consume a significant part of the Olkaria geothermal complex, which currently produces only 950 megawatts in all its individual power plants working together.
There is no spare capacity for such a massive new electricity user anywhere on Kenya’s grid.
There is no solution in sight
John Tanui, principal secretary of Kenya’s Ministry of Information, said Bloomberg that the project has not yet been formally withdrawn from consideration.
He claims that both sides are still discussing the project, because “the scale of the data center they wanted to build still requires some structuring.”
The Kenyan government will not close half of the country to any private facilities operating within its borders.
Microsoft refuses to accept less power than its original $1 billion plan for that specific location called for.
A separate 60-megawatt project with local developer EcoCloud remains under active discussion at the moment as a smaller alternative, but Olkaria’s main $1 billion proposal is stalled due to disagreements over capacity and a lack of electricity 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 Kenya project the “biggest step forward” for digital technology in the country’s history; However, a step that demands a third of a nation’s electricity may not be a true step forward for Kenyan citizens.
A data center cannot be considered progressive if it requires all other users to turn off the 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 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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