Kathy Gibson reports from the AI Everything Summit in Nairobi – Data centres – critically important if Africa is to advance its AI agenda – use ever-increasing amounts of electricity, which the continent battles to provide.
The ideal solution to the electricity requirement is clean power, and Ethiopia is demonstrating that this is entirely possible.
Albert Murungi, chief ICT officer of the Uganda Electricity Generation Company (UEGCL), says the utility provides only clean energy
“The mighty River Nile powers most of the energy we put on to the grid and export to the rest of the region,” he says. “This means we can power data centres with clean energy.”
Data centres are notoriously power-hungry and AI will drive the need for more capacity even higher.
“Today, we have grid capacity or about 2000 MW,” Murungi explains. “But AI workloads will consume that quite quickly. So there are a lot of new energy projects in the pipeline.”
Investments are largely funded as public-private partnerships (PPPs), Murungi says. “But government has been very intentional about developing our energy potential.”
This includes looking at other green energy sources like floating solar panels behind the reservoirs on dams; and to solar hybrid power stations.
As power consumption increases, the challenge will be to bring the cost down. One possible solution could be to incentivise data centre providers to site their facilities closer to power stations, which would save significantly in wheeling costs while increasing availability.
Regulation could also be introduced to make power more affordable for data centres.