Solomon Asamoah: Ghana's AI test is power and water

Solomon Asamoah's argument is grounded in a physical constraint that the article says is already visible. The International Energy Agency reported in 2025 that electricity consumption by data centres worldwide was on course to more than double by 2030, reaching about 945 terawatt-hours, and its 2026 update found data-centre electricity demand had risen 17 per cent in 2025, with AI-focused facilities growing faster still. Most of that expansion remains concentrated in advanced economies and China, but the engineering lesson travels: large, clustered loads can arrive faster than grids, transformers and generation projects can be built.

Africa begins from a different baseline, which is why Asamoah frames the issue as a resource-budget question rather than a ribbon-cutting. The World Bank reported in June 2026 that more than 560 million people in sub-Saharan Africa still lacked electricity; an IMF regional assessment put electricity access at about 53 per cent and internet access at 38 per cent. Water adds a second constraint, since many cooling designs consume water through evaporation, and usage varies enormously with climate, equipment, workload and cooling technology. The article notes that Asamoah's answer is not to avoid data centres, because depending entirely on distant infrastructure can make services slower and expose businesses and governments to foreign-currency costs, but approving capacity wherever a developer proposes it would also be costly.

The stakes hinge on whether regulators and developers adopt the reporting and valuation discipline Asamoah describes. If they do, the article suggests demand from data centres can help expand the wider system, and Ghana may become more attractive because serious developers can price requirements early. If they do not, the risk is that industrial demand competes carelessly with homes, hospitals and businesses for constrained power and water, and that long waits for grid connections, local opposition and water concerns slow projects as they have in busier markets.