INFRASTRUCTURE
Mombasa's $1.5bn AI data centre plans to build its own power station
AMACO Energy Group's Hercules project — the one the Communications Authority cited last week when arguing data centres need their own licence — is pairing the Mombasa build with LNG-fired gas turbines from GE Vernova, whose installed fleet runs past 7,000 turbines and 800GW across 120 countries. Dongo Kundu and Kilindini are the candidate sites, with an estimated 75MW of industrial demand plus 75–100MW from first data-centre tenants. Worth holding lightly: no confirmed site, anchor customer, financing structure, computing capacity or construction schedule has been published. This is a proposal at scale, not a project under way.
TechTrends KE
FINTECH
Kenyan funds near KSh1 trillion as the money-market habit breaks
Collective investment schemes held KSh948.7 billion at 30 June, per the Capital Markets Authority's quarterly report, with investor numbers up 68% year on year from 2.5 million to about 4.1 million. The shift underneath is the story: money market funds were roughly 90% of the market in March 2020 and are now about 49%, still the largest slice at KSh460 billion but growing only 4% in the quarter against 24% for special funds and 15% for fixed income. Foreign-currency funds jumped 15% in three months to KSh110.5 billion, and 45 of the 47 are dollar-denominated.
TechTrends KE
STARTUPS
Uber says Kenya stays, a week after leaving Nigeria and Uganda
"Kenya remains an important market for Uber," the company said, eight days after shutting Nigeria and Uganda on 2 September and having already left Tanzania — which makes Nairobi its last East African market. The High Court blocked enforcement of the 18% commission cap for failing the procedural test, and suspended that declaration for 12 months to let the state redo it. The economics remain tight on all sides: Nairobi petrol touched KSh197.60 a litre in April, TIFA found 59% of Nairobi users opposed a government minimum fare, and 60% said they would switch transport modes if prices climbed.
TechTrends KE
FINTECH
Absa Bank Kenya confirms Yusuf Omari as CEO
Omari takes the managing director and CEO role with immediate effect after regulatory and internal approvals, ending a two-month interim spell that began on 1 July. He had been the bank's chief financial officer since 2009 — an economics degree, an MBA and an ICPAK fellowship behind him — working on cost-to-income, capital optimisation, digital transformation and ecosystem banking. The appointment lands while Absa Group is buying out the Kenyan unit's minority shareholders in a roughly $239 million deal that helped put Kenya top of Africa's M&A table this year.
TechTrends KE
TELCOS
MTN Nigeria passes 100 million subscribers
MTN Nigeria closed July on 100.86 million active connections, up 2.22 million in a month and 51.76% of the Nigerian market — the first operator there to cross the line, on ₦620.5 billion of first-half capex. Scale is not the same as momentum: Airtel Nigeria grew 7.60% and T2 Mobile 10.99% over the period. The number that should interest Nairobi is the group's fintech base — 70.8 million monthly active Mobile Money users, 1.4 million agents, 2.3 million merchants and 13 billion transactions worth about $330 billion in half a year — the closest thing on the continent to an M-Pesa-scale distribution engine.
TechTrends KE
