Chris Kenna’s Media Stream AI has failed to pay its engineers and its crown jewel is an empty building.
“I didn’t have a mum or a dad, but I did have a Commodore 64,” Chris Kenna told his audience as he wove an inspirational story about growing up in care and teaching himself to code on one of the first mass-market personal computers.
Kenna, an entrepreneur based in Manchester, was speaking to guests at an event hosted by his new company, Media Stream AI, in September last year. After a drinks reception at KPMG’s Manchester office, in a room with commanding views of the city centre, he outlined the company’s plans to develop an industry-leading £50m AI data centre in Salford. It would be powered by cutting-edge Nvidia hardware and cooled sustainably with water from the Rochdale Canal. The company’s website claims this data centre, and four others, are already online.
Two Lenovo managers and an investment director at Rathbones spoke at the event, while Afzal Khan, the Labour MP for Manchester Rusholme, posed for pictures with Kenna on KPMG’s roof terrace.
But an investigation by TBIJ and the Manchester Mill has found that this data centre is currently an empty retail unit, and Salford council has never received any relevant planning application. Our reporting identified a history of false or exaggerated claims by Kenna’s companies, and inconsistencies in his stories about his military career.
Moreover Media Stream AI failed to pay two engineers it hired to develop its commercial AI models, and we have spoken to four contractors who say they are owed tens of thousands of pounds collectively for work they did for Kenna’s previous companies. He disputes the sum.
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The reporting raises serious questions about the support the company received from major multinational companies. Lenovo, the computer giant, accepted MSAI onto its programme promoting AI innovation; KPMG hosted the September launch, and confirmed MSAI was a client, but said it had not provided audit or accountancy services, as Kenna claimed. Kenna also says Nvidia, the world’s most important AI hardware company, accepted MSAI onto its startup accelerator programme.
It also shows how the AI data centre boom is creating an environment where opportunists thrive and others are willing to overlook their outlandish claims.
In theory MSAI is well on the way to becoming a British tech powerhouse, with data centres in Manchester, Liverpool, Dundee and Durham, as well as in Europe. The claim is pretty incredible for a company that’s less than two years old, and is run by a man with no previous experience of working in tech or running data centres.
Its founder, Kenna, told us in an interview that he had signed three contracts worth more than $1bn (£750m) to provide access to Nvidia GPUs purchased from Lenovo.
He later sent over details of a non-binding agreement as evidence of this claim. We asked to see evidence of committed funds, but did not hear back.
Lenovo categorically told us it had never sold any GPUs to MSAI, let alone signed a deal worth hundreds of millions of pounds. Lenovo also said it had never provided any financial support to or received any payment from the company.
When a reporter from the Mill went to look at the supposed data centre in Anchorage Place, they found an empty one-storey building – visibly being advertised as a retail space for sale or rent – in front of an office block. The receptionist in the office block had never heard of the company. We have seen no evidence of the data centres in other locations.
Kenna told us this week the Manchester data centre would be open in two months’ time, and that we couldn’t see any evidence of this because it was being constructed in a modular way, with portable units built off-site. “Lenovo and Nvidia have been working with us, building them out,” Kenna said in our interview, referring to these units. Again, Lenovo denied selling MSAI any GPUs.
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A data centre expert who asked to remain anonymous told us that even modular units would have to be on site at this stage to meet that deadline. “If he was going live in two months, that stuff would be in situ right now … [you have to] put it in and run it and test it for weeks and weeks on end.”
Kenna said no planning permission was needed because the site would only house 70 GPUs, and that there already was sufficient capacity on site to power and cool these units.
The majority of its purported 10,000 GPUs will now be housed in Dundee, Kenna said. He invited us to tour the Dundee site, but when the Mill visited unannounced, they found an unoccupied warehouse. An employee from a nearby unit said he had heard a week and a half ago that the site was being leased as a data centre. MSAI said no one was on site that day.
(MSAI’s website says its data centres have been operational since 2024, before the company had even been registered.)
The data centre expert said construction costs for a data centre of this scale would likely be around £185-300m for the build, and another £450m for the GPUs and IT.
He said it seemed very unlikely a company founded less than two years ago, with a handful of employees, could pull off such a major project. “I mean, it’s just insane, the money that people put into this kind of stuff … you need real depth in your team of people who’ve done this.
“This is not trivial, right? And you are dealing with just very, very, very hot IT, huge electrical loads, right? So the safety, how you control that … It’s a really big thing.”
MSAI claims it has developed an innovative scheme to cool Nvidia chips – which generate significant heat to power AI workloads – with recycled water from the nearby Rochdale Canal. In our interview, Kenna said the scheme was not operational and they were still negotiating with the landowner. “I don’t think they will say no. They haven’t indicated that we’re not allowed to use it,” he said.
The Canal and River Trust, which oversees the canal, said it had not given anyone authorization to use its water in this way, although a commercial property agent had made an initial enquiry. Kenna told us this part of the canal was operated by Peel Holdings, who didn’t respond to our questions.
MSAI’s website also said the heat generated by the Nvidia chips is diverted into vertical farms, and featured the following quote from an unnamed Manchester food bank director: “Fresh produce is often the hardest thing for us to source, and Media Stream AI’s vertical farms provide consistent, high-quality vegetables to families who need them most."
Kenna first said he was unaware of this quote, then suggested any of MSAI’s employees could have added it, and finally that Claude, the AI system it used to build its website, had likely added it erroneously. The claim was removed from MSAI’s website after we asked Kenna about it – and many of the company’s claimed achievements were reframed as targets.
“I apologize for false advertising,” he said. “We have not....we could get quotes. We could get quotes right now, but nobody has received a single tomato from us yet.”
Kenna’s vision is to promote “sovereign AI”, meaning its data centres help UK companies access AI infrastructure without hosting data abroad via multinational businesses like Amazon or Google. It also says it has built the UK’s first sovereign large language model (LLM), Mother, “built, trained, and hosted entirely within British infrastructure”.
Kenna told TBIJ he had personally and single-handedly built Mother, despite having no formal training in computer science. (He said he had taken online courses and had sometimes relied on “vibe coding”, a term used to refer to code written by AI.)
When we began investigating, Kenna went on the defensive. He falsely claimed on the Focus on the Fun Stuff podcast that we had contacted his family.
“I can only talk for myself, but if you pick anybody up and shake them, change falls out,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve done anything bad bad ... there’s no old school stuff, no harassment ... I don’t slap people on their arses, that’s not the businesses I’ve run.”
But our reporting has also found inconsistencies in his backstory.
Although he did serve in the army, he has variously claimed it was for seven, eight, and ten years, before he says he was injured by an improvised explosive device (IED) in Iraq and left in a coma for eight weeks. “I was in a convoy, and the people next to me, the people behind me, no one else survived,” he said in a Pride month presentation for the software company Ataccama. When he recovered, he says he left the Army, came out as gay, and built a career in advertising.
The Walter Mitty Hunters’ Club – a group of veterans that investigates allegations of stolen valour – said it had received several responses from other veterans who knew Kenna and didn’t recall such an incident.
Kenna, who has the 18 Signal Regiment’s logo, a sword overlaid with three lightning bolts, tattooed on his hand, said in our interview that his near-death experience happened in 2004. There were three incidents in Iraq in 2004 in which more than one British serviceperson was killed, according to government records.
We repeatedly asked Kenna for further details that would allow us to corroborate the IED incident and he didn’t provide any. However, he did send a statement from a veteran who says he served alongside him from 2005 – the year after Kenna told us he was seriously injured. The statement does not mention the IED incident.
When we queried the discrepancy, MSAI’s VP of infrastructure, Dean Evans, who is also Kenna’s romantic partner, told us that the date given in the interview was likely wrong due to recall problems caused by Kenna’s epilepsy, and that he would not be engaging with questions “focusing on increasingly granular detail”.
Kenna also claims to have been on DEI advisory boards of various high-profile organisations: ITV, TikTok, the V&A and the Metropolitan Police. When approached by the Mill, the V&A and ITV confirmed this, and the Met wouldn’t comment. TikTok, however, said it didn’t have an advisory board.
And while Media Stream AI (MSAI) has claimed it has a “£15m annual payroll” and created 400 jobs, our reporting found that it only recruited for a handful of positions and never paid two engineers for months’ worth of work.
Zayn* was hired as a remote AI engineer in October last year. On his first day, he tried to join a Teams call as instructed, but no one else showed up. He tried to contact Kenna and Evans but got no response until he messaged Kenna on LinkedIn.
“That was the first red flag. I already had a bad feeling about this place,” he said. At lunchtime, he was told he would be starting the following day and eventually he began working on MSAI’s image generation models.
After the first two weeks, Zayn asked about his salary and was told he had missed payroll for that month. But when the next payday arrived he still received nothing. When he chased Kenna, he was told that he was in hospital and that he should contact MSAI’s accounts team.
“So I go into my company email and I contact accounts and then the next morning my company email is revoked,” Zayn said.
A few days later, he was told they would resolve the issue. “They start saying things like ‘the money should be in your account within 24 hours … the money should be here in three to five working days’.
“The money should be delivered instantly … I was like, what do you mean three to five working days? Is it gonna get carried over by a carrier pigeon?”
As of March, Zayn had still not been paid and had made a claim for unpaid wages with HMRC. “I’ve only just graduated from university, right? I didn’t expect my first job to be having to fight a court case with a CEO.”
We’re aware of another AI engineer who has also never been paid for his work for MSAI and suffered significant financial hardship, including having his utilities disconnected, as a result.
Kenna acknowledged in our interview that the two engineers had never been paid and that he had “fucked it up,” but claimed they had been informed of potential funding issues early on. He said he deeply regretted this failure and that MSAI had recently reached out to both of them with a view to paying them at the end of the month. No payments had been made at the time of the interview.
Kenna has been repeatedly accused of not paying contractors at previous companies. Two contractors who worked for Kenna at Brand Advance, a media agency that promoted diverse perspectives and has since been liquidated, say they are owed substantial amounts for writing and media buying work.
Two other people say they were never paid for work done for another of Kenna’s ventures, GenB TV, a streaming service focused on Black British culture. One attempted to recover these fees in court but says he was told it wasn’t possible because the contracting company, BA Diversity Media Inc, has also been liquidated.
Kenna said he was sorry to anyone affected by his previous companies closing, but disputed that anybody was owed tens of thousands of pounds. He said these previous companies had no legal bearing on MSAI.
For now Kenna is undeterred. In a recent LinkedIn post announcing the launch of Media Stream AI’s LLM, he addressed the difficulties the company has faced, but promised to carry on.
“I know every founder says it, but it really was hard getting to this point,” he wrote. “I don’t really know why, or where it has come from, but I just had a relentless conviction to carry on when many probably would have stopped.”
There is growing concern around where the money for data centres is coming from, as investment reaches record levels. A number of the UK government’s data centre partnerships were based on “phantom investments” and shaky accounting, according to a Guardian investigation.
Money & Markets Editor
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