William Ruto

William Ruto has served as President of Kenya since September 2022, having previously served as Deputy President. He made international headlines in the data-centre sector in May 2026 when his government suspended the $1 billion Microsoft-G42 geothermal data-centre campus at Olkaria in Kenya's Rift Valley, on the grounds that the project's full 1 GW target would consume a third of Kenya's approximately 3 GW national installed capacity. Ruto stated publicly that building the campus at full scale would require switching off half the country, a phrase that captured the structural mismatch between hyperscale compute demand and developing-nation energy supply. Subsequent reporting has added a second dimension: the suspended project was also stalled because the Microsoft-G42 consortium requested a sovereign capacity-payment guarantee from Kenya Power and Lighting Company, which Ruto's government declined. The Olkaria suspension is therefore as much a commercial dispute over offtake risk as a grid-capacity limit.

Ruto came to power on a platform of economic transformation centred on digital infrastructure and sovereign technology capacity. The Olkaria episode is not a rejection of the underlying ambition; his administration had actively courted both Microsoft and G42, and Kenya has positioned itself as Africa's digital-economy gateway via the subsea cable landings at Mombasa. Rather, the suspension and the declined guarantee reflect the reality that Kenya cannot absorb a single 1 GW anchor tenant without both grid-expansion investment and risk-transfer terms the government is not prepared to accept.

The episode has drawn attention to a tension in Ruto's digital economy agenda: attracting hyperscale investment while ensuring infrastructure costs and load priorities serve Kenya's 55 million citizens rather than foreign operators alone.