Greek multinational Amaco Energy Group plans to build a $1.5 billion (Sh194 billion) AI data centre in Mombasa that would run entirely off Kenya’s national grid — a design that directly addresses the constraint which has stalled the country’s flagship data centre project.
Amaco chief executive Theodore Theodoropoulos is in Kenya for talks with government officials seeking approval for the project, which combines a large data centre facility with an independent power-generation system.
“A key objective of Dr Theodoropoulos’s visit to Nairobi is to explore the development of one of the world’s largest AI data-centre facilities in Kenya, designed as a fully integrated and independently powered installation, without reliance on the national electricity grid or conventional natural-gas infrastructure,” an Amaco spokesperson told Business Daily.
Why off-grid matters here
The proposal lands against a specific and well-documented failure. The $1 billion Microsoft and G42 data centre at Olkaria, announced during President William Ruto’s Washington state visit in May 2024, has stalled over power. Kenya’s installed capacity stands at roughly 3,000MW, and the facility’s requirement was revised upward from an initial 60MW to 1,000MW for regional use — a third of the entire national grid.
Ruto acknowledged in May that the country’s electricity system could not accommodate the scale without disrupting supply to households and industry. Business Daily reports the project has been further delayed by Kenya’s reluctance to guarantee uptake of cloud capacity, a commitment the companies sought.
Amaco’s answer is to remove the grid from the equation. The Mombasa facility would draw on an offshore liquefied natural gas-powered electricity supply through an energy system the company calls Hercules, which processes natural gas and integrates power generation and cooling into a single platform. Amaco says the concept could also contribute surplus generation capacity to Kenya’s broader energy needs.
If that works as described, it inverts the usual proposition: rather than a data centre competing with households for scarce power, it would arrive with its own supply and potentially add to the national pool.
What has not been disclosed
Amaco has not stated the facility’s capacity in megawatts, its construction timeline, or how the $1.5 billion would be financed. Without a capacity figure, the claim to “one of the world’s largest” cannot be assessed — the largest global AI campuses now run into multiple gigawatts.
The company also has prior history with Kenyan state entities. In 2019, Business Daily reported that MPs were probing Amaco over a Sh400 million Kenya Pipeline Company deal.
Nor does the announcement address water. Large data centres require substantial volumes for cooling, and Mombasa is a coastal city where water stress is already a live issue — a question that surfaced sharply when eThekwini councillors demanded transparency on a proposed Durban facility earlier this year.
Kenya’s compute gap
Kenya has only two AI-capable data centres, against South Africa’s five and Nigeria’s one, according to Data Centre Map. Africa hosts roughly 1% of global data centre capacity while home to 18% of the world’s population.
Existing operators in Kenya — EADC Liquid, iColo, Africa Data Centre, COMTEC, Access, Safaricom, MTN Business and Telkom Kenya — run smaller-scale facilities. Qhala, Amini AI, Angani and iXAfrica launched the Qubit Hub AI research lab in Nairobi in May, hosted on iXAfrica infrastructure, explicitly to give African researchers compute access.
McKinsey projects continental capacity must grow from about 0.4 gigawatts to as much as 2.2 gigawatts by 2030, requiring $10 billion to $20 billion in investment.
The pattern to watch
Kenya has been courting AI infrastructure investors aggressively, and this is the second billion-dollar-scale proposal in two years. The first has not been built.
What distinguishes Amaco’s is that it does not ask Kenya to solve its power problem first. Whether an offshore LNG-powered, self-contained facility is technically and commercially deliverable at this scale is a separate question — and one the absence of capacity figures, timelines and financing detail leaves open.
Based on reporting by Dennis Musau for Business Daily Africa.
