A Greek energy firm has revived a two-year-old Mombasa gas project as a $1.5 billion pitch to power East Africa’s next generation of AI data centres without touching Kenya’s grid.
The timing matters because Kenya’s most prominent AI-infrastructure deal has stalled. Kenya currently has only two AI-capable data centres, against five in South Africa and one in Nigeria, according to the industry directory Data Centre Map, and the government’s marquee alternative, a $1 billion Microsoft-G42 facility, has been held up by exactly the power constraints Amaco Energy Group says its proposal sidesteps.
Amaco chief executive Theodore Theodoropoulos has been in Nairobi seeking government approval for the Mombasa facility, which the Athens-based company describes as a fully integrated, independently powered installation. Its Hercules platform would combine offshore liquefied natural gas generation, cooling systems and direct support for high-density AI servers, drawing nothing from Kenya’s national grid and potentially feeding surplus electricity back into it. An Amaco spokesperson told Business Daily Africa the concept “has the potential to contribute significant additional power-generation capacity” beyond the data centre itself.
The pitch is not a clean-sheet AI proposal, however. Amaco registered a similar Mombasa scheme in 2024, described in company filings as an LNG-to-power and gas transmission project with regasification capacity of 10.5 billion cubic metres a year, well before artificial intelligence entered the pitch. In May 2026, the company folded that groundwork into a wider strategy covering AI-driven offshore energy projects across the Middle East, East Africa and Europe. The Mombasa proposal is effectively existing gas infrastructure repackaged for a new customer: AI compute.
The contrast with the Microsoft-G42 project is instructive. Kenyan President William Ruto announced that $1 billion, Sh129.5 billion facility near Olkaria in Nakuru County in May 2024 as a flagship for the country’s digital economy. Progress stalled after Kenya’s National Treasury withheld funding approval and the parties disagreed over Microsoft’s request for guaranteed cloud-capacity uptake. Power was central to the dispute: the facility’s power requirement grew from an initial phase reported at between 60 and 100 megawatts to a full build-out near 1,000 megawatts, close to a third of Kenya’s roughly 3,000-megawatt installed capacity, according to Kenyan officials cited in local reporting. By mid-2026 the project had effectively stalled.
Amaco’s offshore model is designed to avoid that exact bottleneck, but it carries its own unresolved questions. The company has not disclosed the facility’s power capacity, construction timeline or financing structure, and no government approvals have been confirmed. LNG remains a fossil fuel exposed to global price swings, and a floating platform of this scale off Mombasa is largely untested commercially, raising questions about marine impact, cybersecurity and resilience to Indian Ocean storms. A regional AI facility processing data from multiple countries would also test Kenya’s Data Protection Act on cross-border transfers.
Mombasa’s appeal lies partly in geography. The port city sits near the subsea cable landing stations that connect East Africa to Europe, the Middle East and Asia, giving any data centre built there a direct line to global networks that inland sites lack. Whether that advantage, paired with an offshore power supply, is enough to succeed where a government-backed hyperscale deal could not will depend on negotiations still under way in Nairobi.
