Strive Masiyiwa, founder and executive chairman of Cassava Technologies, has pledged to fast-track Africa’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution.
He announced yesterday that his team plans to establish a series of AI factories across the continent. “We expect to deliver the first five regional AI factories within 12 months,” he said.
These factories are to be located in regional hubs, namely South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, and Morocco.
He also revealed the expansion of Cassava’s cloud-based AI offering, designed to address data sovereignty issues.
“We are now launching an expansion of what we call the ‘Sovereign AI Cloud,’ which will allow every African country to have its own AI factory,” he said.
Time magazine reported that only five percent of Africa’s AI talent currently has access to the computing power needed for advanced research. By bringing AI infrastructure closer to home, Masiyiwa stressed that Cassava aims to bridge this gap and position Africa at the forefront of the fourth industrial revolution.
In that regard, Cassava Technologies has already partnered with Nvidia to expand access to computing power across the continent. The first facility, to be launched in South Africa, will provide access to 3 000 Nvidia GPUs, with African AI practitioners already reserving access to much of the initial capacity. Over time, Cassava expects to invest up to $720 million in this pan-African AI infrastructure, the group has said.
Masiyiwa emphasised that the initiative is part of Cassava’s broader ambition to shape Africa’s digital future and ensure that it is not left behind in the race to build economies around AI. “Our AI factory provides the infrastructure for innovation to scale, empowering African businesses, start-ups, and researchers with access to cutting-edge AI infrastructure. Now they don’t have to look beyond Africa to get it.”
“I helped pioneer Africa’s mobile revolution and then Africa’s high-capacity broadband. Now we are driving the continent’s AI revolution,” he said.
To do this, Cassava’s portfolio of companies is structured to tackle the necessary opportunities. The group includes Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Liquid Cloud C2, Africa Data Centres and the recently-launched Cassava AI. The new business unit has partnered with AWS, Microsoft, Google and Anthropic to offer solutions based on their AI services.
Masiyiwa also noted yesterday a new partnership secured by the group, which he referred to as the ‘Distributed AI Cloud’. The announcement relates to a ‘Gemini on Google Distributed Cloud’ agreement, which was first made two weeks ago, by Google Cloud president Thomas Kurian. Gemini on Google Distributed Cloud is a hybrid cloud approach to accessing AI in the cloud or on-premises using Google Cloud’s platform.
Share
