PASTFORWARD

From the desk of George Okello in Kenya

Can we move past forward?

The idea sounds contradictory. But PastForward is a challenge: as we rush toward the next technological breakthrough, can we also look backward and apply the lessons of previous ones?

The world has a habit of equating new with better. New technologies, new products, new platforms and new systems arrive with enormous expectations, while the limitations and failures of what came before are quickly forgotten. Artificial intelligence is now the latest example. Kenya, like many countries, does not want to be left behind.

But the AI race has a physical infrastructure that is easy to overlook.

If humans have hearts and automobiles have engines, AI has data centers. They require enormous quantities of electricity, water, cooling capacity and connectivity. Around the world, communities and governments are increasingly confronting the environmental and infrastructure costs of this expansion. Energy and water are not optional inputs. They are basic resources, and development strategies that compete directly with those needs will eventually face political, economic and social limits.

This is the challenge behind Kipeto Green Data Center, a proposal from Kenyan company Rydlr Cloud Services Limited. The project envisions a 50-megawatt renewable energy facility using wind and solar power, alongside a 50-megawatt data center infrastructure for cooling, networking and storage.

The proposition is straightforward: if AI infrastructure is going to expand, why not build it around renewable energy and design sustainability into the system from the beginning?

That is the opportunity. But it is also where the hard questions begin.

Kenya and other African countries have produced ambitious visions, missions and development plans for decades. The problem has rarely been a shortage of ambition. Execution, financing, infrastructure, governance and long-term institutional capacity have been the constraints.

AI will not change that by itself.

AI has enormous potential to improve healthcare, education, agriculture, logistics, financial services and public administration. It could reduce costs, extend expertise into underserved areas and create entirely new industries. But technology does not automatically produce development. A country can have world-class AI infrastructure and still have poor schools, inadequate healthcare, food insecurity and extreme inequality.

The real test is therefore not whether Africa adopts AI.

The test is whether Africa can turn AI into productive capacity.

That means reliable power, affordable connectivity, skilled workers, strong institutions, accessible capital and applications that solve actual economic and social problems. It also means avoiding the mistake of building infrastructure simply because a technology is fashionable.

Kipeto Green Data Center remains at the MOU and early-development stage. Whether it reaches construction, achieves commercial scale and operates successfully over decades is still an open question. Renewable energy does not eliminate the challenges of financing, grid integration, cooling, connectivity, demand, regulation or technical obsolescence.

And AI infrastructure will itself evolve.

The history of technology provides plenty of warnings. The steam engine, printing press, telephone, railroads, automobile, internet and smartphone all transformed economies. None of them eliminated poverty, inequality or poor governance. Technology changes what is possible; it does not determine what societies choose to do with those possibilities.

That is the PastForward question.

Rather than treating every new technology as an inevitable step toward progress, we should ask what previous technological revolutions actually delivered, who benefited, what failed, and why.

AI may become one of the most consequential technologies of this century. Africa should absolutely compete for a meaningful position in that economy. But the objective should not simply be to catch up.

It should be to build better.

That means data centers powered by sustainable energy. Infrastructure designed for local conditions. Technology businesses that create productive capacity rather than dependency. AI applications tied to measurable outcomes. And investment decisions based on long-term economic value rather than technological hype.

Kipeto Green Data Center is therefore more than a proposed data center. It represents a larger question facing Kenya and Africa: Can the next generation of infrastructure be built differently from the last?

The answer will not come from another vision statement.

It will come from execution.

PastForward asks us to look backward without becoming backward-looking—and to move forward without assuming that everything new is progress.