Microsoft dismantles its Nairobi engineering centre, seven years after a $100 million promise

On Monday, October 12, in the Dunhill Towers offices in Westlands, Microsoft’s engineers got the news they had been dreading since the summer: the centre where they work is closing. That is what a person employed there told CIO Africa, and other staff said the same to several Kenyan outlets. The next day TechCabal, citing two employees who asked not to be named, put the number of jobs at risk at nearly 400. Staff were asked to meet their managers by Friday, October 16, to discuss exit options and severance.

Microsoft has not used the word “closure”. A spokesperson told CIO Africa these were “proposed changes” tied to the company’s global restructuring, which had “impacted the engineering department in Kenya”. The company says it will keep operating in the country, keep employees there and keep serving customers in the region. “We recognise the uncertainty this brings,” it told Kenyans.co.ke. No headcount, no timeline, nothing on possible transfers to other teams.

The vagueness fools few people. According to tech-ish, on the day of the announcement Microsoft’s careers site listed no open positions in Kenya.

What Nairobi loses

The Africa Development Centre was never a call centre or a support desk. When Microsoft announced it on May 13, 2019, the idea was to write code for the company’s global products from Nairobi and Lagos. The pledge came with numbers: $100 million over five years, 100 full-time engineers by the end of 2019 and 500 across the two sites by 2023. Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox and the project’s executive sponsor, said at the time that “the ADC will be unlike any other existing investment on the continent.”

For a while, the promise held. In March 2022, when President Uhuru Kenyatta opened the Westlands offices, the Nairobi centre had more than 450 full-time engineers and product leaders. Catherine Muraga became its managing director that June. The Kenyan teams worked on identity, Microsoft 365, Windows and devices, security and developer tools. According to tech-ish, they are among the top contributors to Microsoft Graph libraries downloaded hundreds of millions of times, and Kenya-based engineers are named as inventors on at least eight patent families.

That is what Nairobi is losing: jobs where people learn to design, test and maintain software used by hundreds of millions, to the standards of a US software company. Those skills will not vanish overnight. Several hundred experienced engineers are about to hit the Kenyan job market, which is good news for local start-ups and banks that struggled to hire them. But the place that trained them is shutting down.

One question remains open: what happens to Microsoft Research Africa and the Microsoft Garage, which share the building. Microsoft has not said whether they are affected.

The exit is also taking place in a tense climate. On September 23, a former ADC product manager now at Google claimed on LinkedIn that some staff had been offered, near the end of the quarter, a choice between a six-week performance improvement plan and a so-called voluntary departure. He was relaying what others had told him; the claims have not been verified and Microsoft has not responded. Kenyan law is clear on one point: in a redundancy, each employee is owed a month’s notice, accrued leave and at least 15 days’ pay for every year of service.

Lagos was the dress rehearsal

Nairobi’s engineers had a precedent in front of them. In May 2024 Microsoft shut the Nigerian arm of the ADC in Lagos, where about 200 jobs were at risk, according to The Guardian Nigeria. The company said then that it had “decided to close the Africa Development Centre in Nigeria”, while insisting that “this is not a site closure” and that there were “no impacts” to the Kenyan centre. Lagos had worked on Mesh, a mixed-reality platform Microsoft has since retired.

Kenya had not been entirely spared even then: in March 2023 engineers and product managers in Nairobi were laid off, in the wake of the 10,000 job cuts announced by Satya Nadella. Microsoft never said how many.

The 2026 decision is part of a global pattern. In May 2025 the company cut 6,000 jobs. In July 2026 it cut about 4,800, or 2.1% of its workforce, mostly in sales and Xbox; the internal memo warned that engineering teams would “evolve their structure and priorities”. On September 22, another 268 Xbox roles went. In 2025 Microsoft also ended its direct operations in Pakistan. Nairobi was not singled out. It simply became, inside a company pouring tens of billions into AI data centres, one cost line among many.

What Microsoft keeps in Kenya

On the same Monday, William Kabogo, Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communications and the Digital Economy, received a delegation led by Jeff Bullwinkel, Microsoft’s vice-president and deputy general counsel for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Angela Ng’ang’a, appointed East Africa lead in August, was with him. Microsoft “briefed me on its evolving operations in Kenya”, the minister wrote, adding: “I stressed the importance of retaining local talent, protecting jobs at Microsoft’s Nairobi engineering Centre.” He also raised investor confidence.

He got no announcement on jobs. What he left with was a joint action plan to draw up: AI in government, digital public services, cybersecurity, infrastructure and skills. In other words, what Microsoft keeps in Kenya is its sales force, its customers, its government contracts and its training programmes. The business that earns money stays; the part that costs money goes.

Then there is the showpiece: the $1 billion data centre announced in May 2024 with G42, the Emirati AI company, during William Ruto’s state visit to Washington. It was meant to run on geothermal power from Olkaria and host an Azure cloud region for East Africa. In September 2025, according to Semafor, ground had still not been broken. In May 2026 the Kenyan president said the facility would have needed about a third of the country’s power capacity. Semafor reported that the Treasury did not release the funding requested; Bloomberg reported that Microsoft and G42 wanted the state to commit to leasing a share of the capacity every year. The government insists the project has not been abandoned.

What Nairobi tells other capitals

Kenya did everything by the book. One president at the launch, another at the opening, partner universities, a capital that has marketed itself for years as East Africa’s “Silicon Savannah”. None of it counted once headquarters reset its priorities.

The lesson applies to every capital courting American or Chinese tech giants, including Dakar, whose New Deal technologique aims to make Senegal an African digital hub. A five-year dollar pledge is a five-year pledge. Once the money is spent, nothing obliges the company to carry on. A sales office or a public cloud contract survives restructurings because it makes money. An engineering centre depends on the goodwill of a few executives on the other side of the world. According to tech-ish, several of the executives who championed the ADC, Phil Spencer among them, have since left the company.

What remains are the people. Hundreds of Kenyan and Nigerian engineers spent years working on global products. Several have already moved to Google or elsewhere. For a country, that may be the only lasting return on these investments: less the building than the skills that walk out of it.