The Data Center Americans Hate Could Light Up Rural Africa

Across the United States, towns are pushing back against data centers, the giant buildings full of computers that power the internet and artificial intelligence. Neighbors worry they strain the grid and drive up electricity bills.

In rural Africa, the same kind of machines may do the opposite. They could help bring electricity to villages that have never had it.

That’s the idea behind the Emergent Grid, a project launched this week by an arm of The Rockefeller Foundation. It will test whether selling computing power can help pay for small, local power systems in Africa, and make electricity cheaper and more reliable.

Here’s how it works. Every time you ask an AI chatbot a question, a computer somewhere does the work to answer it. The tech industry calls that work “compute.” Much of it can happen anywhere with electricity and an internet connection, including a shipping container of computers, about the size of a one-car garage, parked next to a solar farm in rural Kenya.

The electricity never leaves the village. The answer goes out over the internet, and money comes back. The customer pays the company that owns the computers, and that company pays the local power supplier for the electricity it uses. That gives the supplier steady income from power that would otherwise go to waste. With it, the supplier can keep its equipment running, string wires to more homes, and charge families less.

When villagers need that power, the computers pause.

The catch: in America, data centers are resented because they can outbid everyone else for power. The project has to show that won’t happen in African villages. And so far, the idea has been proven not with AI, but with bitcoin.

“Compute can be a geographically agnostic buyer of last resort,” Erik Hersman, CEO of Gridless, told me. In plain terms: the computers can go anywhere, and they’ll buy whatever power no one else wants. Gridless has spent four years doing just that at remote African power sites.