Dear readers – today’s story is a collaboration with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Along with their senior tech reporter Niamh McIntyre, we’ve been investigating an AI entrepreneur who has promised massive investments in Manchester. Do they exist?
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This story was the product of several weeks of reporting. Alongside the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, we spent that time fact-checking dozens of claims made by Chris Kenna, speaking to his former employees at multiple companies and visiting sites in Manchester and Scotland.
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Is Chris Kenna Manchester’s first AI billionaire in the making — or a serial fantasist?
I’m standing at Anchorage Place, MediaCityUK, before an empty office block. This — I’ve been told — is the site where Manchester-based entrepreneur Chris Kenna is planning to invest £50 million in one of the most innovative tech projects in the country: a “world-class” AI data centre, which he says is at the centre of a deal worth close to a billion pounds.
But there’s nothing here. No employees, no builders, no sign of any life at all. I walk into the Anchorage Place offices and enquire at the desk about Kenna’s company: Media Stream AI (MSAI). The woman at the desk is baffled. She’s never heard of such a company, or of anyone called Chris Kenna. Certainly, she hasn’t seen any sign of the £50m data centre that was supposed to pop up in this building in the first quarter of this year.
What’s going on here? Kenna claims his company is on course for a £2.5 billion valuation by the end of 2026, instantly transforming the 43-year-old into one of the city’s wealthiest tycoons. Kenna has been photographed at events with local MPs and has been feted in the local press, with the MEN’s sister-site Business Live telling readers in a glowing piece in October last year that the Salford data centre “is set to open in December”.
In one podcast interview, Kenna describes himself as a man with “zero bullshit tolerance”. But the more we’ve interrogated Kenna’s claims, the less they add up. Working with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, we’ve found no evidence of any data centre in the works in Salford — or indeed of the £50 million investment Kenna says he has raised. Leading global tech firms have rubbished statements Kenna has made about working with them, and this week, we even travelled to Dundee to check his claim that he has a centre there. You might be able to guess what we found.
War stories
If Chris Kenna is to be believed, Chris Kenna is a man of extraordinary achievements. He’s a combat veteran, having served two years in the SAS, requiring him to have passed one of the most notoriously difficult military training programmes in the world. He's sat on the advisory board for TikTok and the Metropolitan Police and co-founded an award-winning media company. And that’s before we get to MSAI, the groundbreaking tech firm that promises to deliver “£150m of value to the local economy over the next five years”.
Kenna is a Black, gay man. He usually wears his trademark cap backwards, and frequently appears on podcasts to tell his story, from a childhood in care to business prominence. Across dozens of these media appearances, Kenna cites the values instilled in him during his time in the military as fundamental to his success. On his website, he’s proud to label his business as “veteran-owned”.
His departure from the army became a national news story. Kenna claimed he had been kicked out of the SAS due to his sexual orientation when his then-wife discovered he was gay and informed his chain of command. “Being gay has made no difference to my effectiveness as a soldier,” he told The Times in 2008. “When I completed the SAS course I was the proudest guy alive.”
At the time the claim was disputed by his former colleagues, who said he wasn’t a proper SAS member. “He wasn’t required to pass the SAS fitness tests and failed the one he did do,” one source told The Times.
Other parts of Kenna’s military story are also confusing, like how old he was when he joined the army. In different interviews he has said he was 16, 17, and on a podcast last month he said he’d joined “the day the planes hit the towers”. Kenna was just shy of 19 on 9/11, but when we tried to ask him about these kinds of discrepancies, he said he didn’t want to talk about his time in the SAS.
Kenna’s most striking military tale, repeated countless times, was the life-changing moment his vehicle was hit by an explosive device during his second tour in Iraq in the mid-2000s. “The people behind me, the people next to me, no one else survived,” he reflects in one video. Kenna says he was in a coma for eight weeks and upon recovery, was medically discharged from the army, came out as gay, and had an epiphany that led to a career in advertising. An army spokesperson told us they can’t comment on his service background.
Kenna’s big launch
By 2017, this led to Kenna setting up a company called Brand Advance Ltd, a marketing agency that helped brands reach underrepresented communities. It was dubbed the “industry’s first diversity-focused ad network” and saw Kenna shortlisted for Chief Executive of the Year at the Inclusive Companies Awards 2019. But despite Kenna claiming that his agency was working with clients like Unilever, Google and Mercedes, Brand Advance entered compulsory liquidation in 2024 after HMRC brought a petition to wind it up for unpaid taxes.
Although it had an unfortunate end, Brand Advance elevated Kenna as a public figure. The media appearances ramped up. The Telegraph celebrated his diversity initiatives, while Prolific North noted his role on the advisory board for TikTok, one of the world’s most popular social media companies. This is another flattering detail that we haven’t been able to stand up: a spokesperson for TikTok told us that they do not have an advisory board and that they have never heard of Kenna.
On a bright day last September, Kenna launched his most ambitious project yet. The surroundings conferred prestige: the launch took place in the Manchester offices of global accounting firm KPMG, with Kenna addressing his audience high up above St Peter’s Square, his signature cap spun backwards.
MSAI was a new company that he had set up in February 2025, six months after Brand Advance's compulsory liquidation. A press release included the target £2.5 billion valuation and listed high-profile attendees: two representatives from tech giant Lenovo, Labour’s Rusholme MP Afzal Khan and the entrepreneur Piers Linney, a former star of the TV show Dragons' Den.
It’s unclear why KPMG was willing to host the launch of an unknown company and what the nature of their relationship is. Kenna says KPMG is central to his business, telling us: “They model out for us every new contract, clients, prepare everything for the financing. They prepare everything for the importing of GPUs…the due diligence we have to provide for these contracts, even for our government application as well. They did all of the accounts for that.”
But when we asked KPMG about its work with Kenna, it set off a series of slightly confusing calls with the company’s press office. It appears MSAI is a client of KPMG, but a spokesperson says KPMG doesn’t perform the company’s audit or accounts. When we asked about Kenna’s other claim, that KPMG acts as his startup’s CTO (or chief technology officer), the spokesperson said this isn’t true.
The MP Khan, who was photographed with Kenna, says he only attended the event because he was told that MSAI was “planning to launch/invest in the city” and says he hasn’t been in touch with Kenna since. After seeing Linney mentioned in the event’s press release, we contacted him to get his thoughts on Kenna’s new company. He responded that he “didn’t attend that event”.
‘Like a news horror story’
One former employee at MSAI, a graduate engineer who has asked not to be named, remembers his first day well. It was last October and he was excited about starting his first job out of university, even though the role was remote.
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