Kenya's government suspended the $1 billion Microsoft-G42 geothermal project at Olkaria in the Rift Valley, a hold that surfaced in early May. President William Ruto put the reason plainly: at full scale the campus would draw so much power that, in his words, "building it would mean switching off half the country".1
Olkaria's full 1 GW target would draw roughly a third of Kenya's entire installed capacity of about 3 GW. Microsoft, the project's hyperscaler partner, and G42, the UAE artificial-intelligence firm co-developing it, were not blocked by planning objections or activist pressure but by the raw size of the load against a small national grid.
Geothermal is about as clean and dispatchable as electricity gets, running steadily day and night without the weather dependence of wind or solar. Kenya still could not host the campus, which is the point worth holding: the thing freezing data-centre expansion is rarely how dirty the power is, and almost always how much of it a single campus demands against the capacity already in place.
The pattern crosses hemispheres. When Johor in Malaysia paused approvals after a water-rights protest, the binding limit was resource and grid capacity rather than generation type. Kenya reached the same ceiling from the opposite direction, with clean power in the ground and simply not enough of it to spare.
