Tusiachwe nyuma: Businessman list 4 investments Kenya can make using KSh 5t fund

This story has significance for readers across Kenya and beyond.

- Siscom Technologies founder Derrick Gakuu urged the government to direct part of the KSh 5 trillion National Infrastructure Fund toward digital and AI infrastructure

- Gakuu warned that Kenya risks falling behind in the global AI race if the NIF focuses solely on roads, railways, and ports

- The appeal comes as Kenya's flagship Microsoft-G42 data centre project at Olkaria remains stalled over a power bottleneck

Elijah Ntongai is an experienced editor at TUKO.co.ke, with more than four years in financial, business, labour and technology research and reporting. His work provides valuable insights into Kenyan, African, and global trends.

Siscom Technologies founder Derrick Gakuu has called on the government to allocate a portion of the National Infrastructure Fund (NIF) to digital and artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Gakuu told TUKO.co.ke that Kenya could be sidelined in the global AI economy if policymakers treat such investments as secondary to physical construction projects.

The NIF was formally capitalised in April 2026, when Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi received a KSh 103.45 billion cheque at the Treasury Building in Nairobi, representing proceeds from the government's sale of a 65% stake in Kenya Pipeline Company.

The fund, established under the National Infrastructure Fund Act, 2026, targets mobilising more than KSh 5 trillion over ten years, with further inflows anticipated from a planned reduction in the state's shareholding in Safaricom.

The Case for Digital Infrastructure

Gakuu contends that infrastructure now has a digital dimension that policy has failed to recognise.

"Digital infrastructure, the data centres, fibre networks, and computing capacity that store, transmit, and process information, has become just as fundamental to a functioning economy as electricity or piped water," he said.

Gakuu argues that the numbers tell a stark story of the growing gap because, the total data centre capacity across the entire African continent, combining those that have been built, under construction, and planned, sits at roughly 1.2 gigawatts, with only about 360MW actually operational today, which is less capacity than a single large hyperscale campus in the United States, spread across a continent of 1.4 billion people.

Kenya's only dedicated AI data centre project, a 100MW facility planned jointly by Microsoft and G42 at Olkaria Geothermal, has reportedly stalled because operating the facility at the proposed scale would require diverting electricity from roughly half the country.

Meanwhile, a planned deployment of 12,000 GPUs across Kenya, Egypt, Nigeria, and Morocco by Nvidia and Cassava Technologies has so far produced only an initial tranche of around 3,000 units, currently running in South Africa rather than any of the four target markets.

Five Investment Layers Gakuu Recommends

Drawing on a framework from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Gakuu outlines five interdependent investment layers the NIF should address.

The first is power. The tech-founder argues that directing capital toward additional geothermal capacity, priced competitively and ring-fenced for data centre use, would directly resolve the bottleneck that has stalled the Microsoft-G42 project.

The second is chips. According to Gakuu, Kenya currently lacks the capacity to manufacture GPUs locally, but the government could attract private operators through import duty relief, operational incentives, and co-investment in a national cloud computing facility.

The third is physical data centre infrastructure, where modular, prefabricated facilities suited to Kenya's dispersed economic geography could serve regional demand more efficiently than a handful of large campuses.

The fourth is AI models. Gakuu cites France's Mistral AI, anchored by approximately 18,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips and backed partly by the French state, as proof that sovereign AI capacity is achievable.

" With Swahili spoken by more than 200 million people across East and Central Africa, Kenya is one of the few African countries positioned to build and export models serving an entire linguistic region the same logic that turned Mistral into Europe's answer to Silicon Valley," Gakuu opined.

"A solid base of power, chips, infrastructure, and models creates the conditions for a new economy of AI-native companies, startups, researchers, and labs to build on top of it, solving Kenya's and Africa's own problems rather than importing solutions designed for other markets," he added.

What is the bottom line?

Gakuu points out that Kenya does not need convincing that infrastructure-led leapfrogging works because it invented one of the most cited examples of it anywhere in the world.

M-Pesa did not wait for conventional banking infrastructure to be built the traditional way; it built new infrastructure that solved Kenya's most urgent financial-inclusion problem directly and, in doing so, created an entirely new mobile payments economy that other countries are still trying to replicate.

Gakuu concludes that digital and AI infrastructure represent the same opportunity, and with KPC proceeds already in hand and Safaricom stake sale proceeds on the way, the NIF has the capacity to prioritise digital infrastructure investments.

Source: TUKO.co.ke

Reporting originally appeared via TUKO. Read the full source for additional context.