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.

Ruto came to power on a platform of economic transformation centred on digital infrastructure and sovereign technology capacity. The Olkaria suspension 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 reflects the reality that Kenya's grid cannot absorb a single 1 GW anchor tenant without grid-expansion investment running years ahead of campus commissioning.

The Olkaria episode has drawn attention to a tension in Ruto's digital economy agenda: attracting hyperscale investment while ensuring the infrastructure costs and load priorities serve Kenya's 55 million citizens, not just foreign operators. It has also prompted scrutiny of whether the negotiated terms of the project included grid-upgrade commitments from Microsoft and G42, and if not, why not.