Ruto's claim on data centre power consumption untrue - analysts

President William Ruto last week tickled a room full of Kenyans in Doha, Qatar, sending them laughing at their own plight, when he recalled a rather embarrassing moment.

After signing a deal that would see two multinationals set up shops in Kenya, Ruto narrated how he discovered their power requirements would be nearly a third of the country’s installed capacity.

This was in 2024, during his visit to the United States, where he witnessed the signing of an agreement between power producer KenGen (Kenya Electricity Generating Company), G42 of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Microsoft to build a $1 billion (Sh130 billion) data centre.

The project would be put up at KenGen’s Green Energy Park, with among its unique attributes being that it will be 100 per cent powered by renewable energy, tapped from KenGen’s geothermal fields at Olkaria. Ruto said that later, he would find out that data centres are power guzzlers and that to operate one, an entity requires about 1,000 megawatts (MW).

This would translate to about 31.2 per cent of Kenya’s installed electricity-generating capacity that stood at 3,200MW as of June 2025, according to the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (Epra) data.

“We signed an agreement between G42, Microsoft and Kenya to establish data centres… later we were told that one data centre requires 1,000MW and our installed capacity is 2,300MW (actual installed capacity is 3,200MW). So for us to operationalise one data centre, we have to shut down half the country,” said the President, but added that

“If we have to industrialise, engage in manufacturing, we need a minimum of 10,000MW and we need it like yesterday.”

While there is a consensus that Kenya is in urgent need of additional power-generating capacity, President Ruto’s assertion that data centres on average require 1,000MW appears to have been an exaggeration in his bid to highlight the dire situation in Kenya.

Reports following the agreement between KenGen, Microsoft, and G42 stated that the first phase of the data centre would have a capacity of 100MW, but would be scalable and eventually expected to reach 1,000MW.  The project, dubbed the ‘East Africa Cloud Region’, is expected to offer Microsoft Azure cloud services powered by G42’s green data centres.

“It will provide scalable, secure and high-speed cloud computing and AI capabilities to accelerate digital transformation across Kenya, East Africa, and the continent,” said KenGen.

Isaac Ndereva, an electricity billing expert and executive director of Electricity Consumers Society of Kenya (ELCOS), noted that at the moment, the power requirements for most data centres are below 100MW, while a handful of consumers require over 100MW.

“President Ruto has bad advisors,” said Ndereva in an interview with a local radio station, noting that the Head of State may not have received a proper brief from his advisors that led to his claim that one data centre requires 1,000MW.

“For instance, his claim that one data centre requires 1,000MW… the biggest data centre in the world at the moment consumes a maximum of 150MW.”

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), “average data centres are quite small in power terms, with demand in the order of five to 10 megawatts (MW)”.

“But large hyperscale data centres, which are increasingly common, have power demands of 100 MW or more, with an annual electricity consumption equivalent to the electricity demand from around 350,000 to 400,000 electric cars,” said IEA.

“Today, data centres account for around one per cent of global electricity consumption, and annual electricity consumption from data centres globally is about half of the electricity consumption from household IT appliances, like computers, phones and TVs.” It, however, noted the fast-growing capacity of data centres, with the consumption expected to double by 2030. It would more than double to around 945 terawatt hours (TWh) by 2030 from 415 terawatt-hours in 2024.

Data centre capacity can be looked at from different perspectives, including their energy consumption needs and physical areas. Among the largest in terms of physical size is China Telecom-Inner Mongolia Information Park, spanning 994,000 square metres and using 150MW of power.

One of the largest in terms of power consumption is Switch Citadel Campus in Nevada, US, whose initial capacity was 130MW, which was last increased by 55MW. It was originally designed for a capacity of up to 650MW, but there are considerations to increase this to 2,000MW in later phases.

There are, however, numerous planned data centres with a capacity of over 1,000MW.