[New Blog Post] Microsoft Is Closing Its Nairobi Engineering Hub. The Talent Was Never The Problem. Yesterday, engineers at Microsoft's Africa Development Centre in Nairobi were reportedly told the centre is closing. Lagos went the same way in May 2024, when we were told Kenya was not affected. I vividly remember when the ADC arrived in 2019 with a US$100 million pledge. It mopped up the best engineers from Safaricom, the banks and start-ups that had trained them, with pay reported at up to KES 1.8 million a month for principal roles. Local firms were simply outbid. So what changed? I do not believe the talent failed. Microsoft hit its 500-engineer target a year early and trusted Nairobi with the systems behind Microsoft account sign-ins. I also do not believe it "lost money" here, because the ADC never sold anything to Africa. It built global products. Africa was a developer supply, not a developer market. What changed is what is scarce. In 2019 it was engineers. In 2026 it is compute, power and capital. Microsoft is spending roughly US$190 billion on AI infrastructure this year and has cut more than 20,000 jobs since early 2025 to help fund it. AI did not write the Nairobi engineers out of their jobs. The bill for AI did. Kenya lost on both sides of that trade. Our talent is no longer scarce enough to anchor a multinational, and the US$1 billion Olkaria data centre stalled because we lack the power. The lesson for Kenya and Africa is that engineering jobs on somebody else's roadmap are rented. The people, however, are ours. A few hundred world-class engineers are about to come onto the market. Hire them. Fund them. Something even better can come out of this moment. Full analysis on my blog: moseskemibaro.com/2026/10/13… #Microsoft #ADC #Nairobi #Kenya #Technology #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Talent – at Nairobi, Kenya