Kenyan President says to power Microsoft's datacenter 'we would need to switch off power for half the country', adds ‘point is …’

Kenyan President William Ruto recently said that powering Microsoft’s upcoming data centre may require more electricity than the entire country can spare. "We would need to switch off half the country for the data centre to be powered," Ruto said at a recent state event in Nairobi. According to a report by Bloomberg, the ambitious $1 billion project — which was meant to bring major cloud computing capacity to East Africa — has been delayed after talks between Microsoft, its partner G42, and the Kenyan government broke down over money and power. While the project is not dead, officials say, its future remains uncertain.The deal, announced in 2024, envisioned a large geothermal-powered data centre that would dramatically expand cloud computing across the region. As per the report, Microsoft and its partner, Abu Dhabi-based technology conglomerate G42, had asked the Kenyan government to commit to paying for a guaranteed amount of capacity every year. When the government could not provide guarantees at the level Microsoft requested, the talks collapsed, according to people familiar with the matter as cited by the publication.John Tanui, principal secretary at Kenya's Ministry of Information, pushed back on the idea that the project had failed. "It is not failed or withdrawn," he said in an interview with Bloomberg. "The scale of the data centre they wanted to do still requires some structuring." Power requirements, he added, are still being worked out.President Ruto's technology envoy, Philip Thigo, also clarified the president's remarks. "Ruto's point has not been that the project was suspended, but that Kenya must confront the scale of energy required to support next-generation digital infrastructure," Thigo said in an emailed statement to the publication.Microsoft president Brad Smith has previously called the proposed project the "single biggest step to advance the availability of digital technology" in Kenya's history. The stakes go beyond Microsoft and Kenya. The project was the first planned joint venture between Microsoft and G42 after Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in the UAE-based company. Before that investment, G42 had agreed to remove Chinese equipment from its systems and divest from Chinese holdings.Analysts say a failure to complete the project would hurt G42's ambitions to expand globally as a credible AI provider, and would weaken the United Arab Emirates' role as a bridge between American technology companies and emerging markets.