TL;DR · 30-second read
The Short Version
A Greek energy company and an American turbine maker want to build a $1.5 billion artificial intelligence data centre at the port of Mombasa, Kenya.
The unusual part: it would generate its own electricity on a barge floating in the harbour, burning imported natural gas, and never plug into Kenya’s national power network at all. That sidesteps blackouts and the long wait to get connected.
If it is approved and built, East Africa would gain the kind of heavy computing power that today sits mostly in Europe and America. Kenyan regulators have not yet said yes.
Construction Review reported that Greek multinational Amaco Energy Group has partnered with US energy equipment and services company GE Vernova on Project HERCULES, a proposed $1.5 billion (roughly KSh 194.2 billion) artificial intelligence data centre at the Port of Mombasa, Kenya. Under the arrangement, GE Vernova gas turbines would be integrated into an Amaco power barge, an unmotorised floating platform housing a power plant, that supplies the campus with electricity and cooling.
The facility is designed to run entirely off-grid on offshore liquefied natural gas, with power scalable from an initial 60 to 100 megawatts up to 1,000 megawatts, and with the option to export surplus electricity to Kenya’s national network near the Mariakani substation. The project sits in the Port of Mombasa and Dongo Kundu ecosystem, is listed as proposed and pending regulatory approval, and is estimated to take about 28 months to build once approved.
Executive Summary
Project HERCULES is best understood not as a data centre that happens to have a power plant, but as a power project that has found a customer. The blueprint evolved from an earlier liquefied natural gas-to-power transmission proposal registered in 2024. In its current form, the generation, the cooling and the compute halls are bundled into a single floating architecture moored inside the port, with GE Vernova supplying the turbines and electrification equipment.
That structure is a direct answer to the constraint that has slowed large computing campuses across much of Africa. Land is available, subsea fibre has landed, and capital is willing. What is scarce is firm, reliable power delivered on a developer’s schedule rather than a utility’s. By declining to connect at all, Amaco converts a multi-year grid question into a procurement and permitting question it can largely control.
The trade is real but not free. An off-grid campus becomes its own utility: it carries fuel price exposure, it must build its own redundancy because there is no network to fall back on, and it must satisfy Kenyan energy, environmental and port regulators before any of it exists. Nothing has been approved, no customer has been named, and the financing behind the headline number has not been described.
When the Grid Is the Bottleneck, Bring Your Own
In mature markets, the queue to connect a large electrical load to the national network, known in the industry as the interconnection queue, has become the single longest item on a data centre schedule. In much of sub-Saharan Africa the problem takes a different shape: the wait can be shorter, but the delivered power is less firm, and a campus full of high-density servers cannot absorb unplanned outages. The Amaco framing is explicit on this point. Bypassing the grid, it argues, removes downtime tied to supply shortages rather than merely hedging against it.
Inverting the sequence has a commercial logic that goes beyond reliability. A developer who owns generation can commit to an energisation date, and an energisation date is what an anchor tenant is actually buying. The cost is that the developer becomes a power company. Fuel must be contracted and shipped, turbines must be maintained, and the redundancy that a utility connection normally provides has to be built into the platform itself. A campus that is genuinely 100 percent islanded has no external backstop, so its reserve margin is a design choice with a capital cost attached.
The Barge Is the Product
An unmotorised power barge is built in a shipyard and towed to its mooring. That matters more than it sounds. Shipyard fabrication trades unpredictable on-site civil works for a controlled construction environment, which is one plausible route to the stated 28-month build. It also makes the asset relocatable in principle, and it places the plant on water, which simplifies the heat rejection problem that dominates dense computing. The release describes direct cooling integrated into the same floating structure, though the specific method is not detailed.
The capacity range published for the project spans from an initial 60 to 100 megawatts to an eventual 1,000 megawatts. That is more than a tenfold spread, and it should be read as a statement of modular ambition rather than a committed build. The $1.5 billion valuation is not tied in the announcement to any particular point on that range. Anyone sizing the opportunity, whether a lender, a turbine supplier or a prospective tenant, needs to know which phase the figure buys, because the answer determines whether this is a large regional facility or the first slice of something hyperscale.
Landing Where the Cables Land
Mombasa’s strategic case rests on geography. It is East Africa’s principal arrival point for international subsea fibre-optic cables, the undersea trunk lines that carry almost all intercontinental internet traffic. Putting compute next to a cable landing station shortens the path between regional users and the machines serving them, and it makes local data residency possible for customers whose regulators or contracts require it. The project also targets industrial synergy with the neighbouring ARISE Coast Integrated Industrial Park inside the 3,000-acre Dongo Kundu Special Economic Zone, which offers a second class of power offtake alongside the servers.
The demand question is more nuanced than the connectivity story suggests. Large-scale artificial intelligence training is relatively indifferent to latency and gravitates to wherever power is cheapest. What benefits from proximity is inference, the stage where a trained model actually answers queries, along with sovereign and enterprise hosting for governments, banks and telecom operators that want their data inside national borders. Those are credible markets, but they are being contested. The announcement itself notes that other countries, Ethiopia among them, are pursuing the same regional hub position.
Who Gains, and What Has to Be True
For GE Vernova, spun out of General Electric in 2024, the appeal is straightforward. Gas turbines have become one of the few technologies that can add firm generation at computing-campus timescales, and a floating deployment extends that market to places where onshore siting is difficult. For Amaco, the repositioning is the more interesting move: a gas-to-power scheme from 2024 has been recast with artificial intelligence demand as its anchor load, which is a considerably more bankable story than selling electrons into a constrained transmission system. The proposed surplus export near the Mariakani substation adds a second revenue line and, just as usefully, gives Kenyan authorities a reason to see the project as a contributor rather than an enclave.
Three conditions have to hold. Imported liquefied natural gas must be priced competitively enough that the campus can quote power rates a regional customer will accept, since fuel, not hardware, dominates the operating cost of a gas-fired site. Regulatory approval must cover energy licensing, environmental consent and port anchoring rights simultaneously, and the announcement places the project firmly at the discussion stage with Kenyan authorities and financiers. And the stated future conversion to hydrogen should be treated as design optionality rather than a near-term plan, because it depends on a fuel supply chain that does not yet exist at this scale anywhere.
Background
Amaco Energy Group is a Greek multinational energy firm. Its Mombasa plan did not begin as a computing project: the blueprint evolved from an earlier liquefied natural gas-to-power transmission proposal registered in 2024, since recast around artificial intelligence demand as the anchor load. GE Vernova is the energy equipment and services company spun out of General Electric in 2024, whose gas turbine business has become central to a global race to add firm generation quickly enough for data centre construction schedules.
Kenya has spent a decade positioning itself as East Africa’s digital gateway, and Mombasa is the physical hinge of that claim because the region’s international subsea fibre-optic cables come ashore there. The country is also building out the Dongo Kundu Special Economic Zone, a 3,000-acre industrial area near the port overseen in part through the Kenya Ports Authority. Competition for the regional hub position is active, with Ethiopia among the countries pursuing similar ambitions. Source: Project HERCULES: Amaco and GE Vernova Partner for $1.5B Off-Grid AI Data Centre in Mombasa — Construction Review’s report on the proposed floating, gas-powered artificial intelligence campus at the Port of Mombasa, including the project factsheet and technical specifications cited above.Sources