MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita has revealed that Africa’s largest telco is in talks with US and European firms to build out a footprint of datacentres across the continent as a way of empowering local adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The move is the latest in a wave of investments by telcos that seeks to democratise access to datacentres and AI services for Africans.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Mupita outlined MTN’s plan to build datacentre facilities and for other players to run AI services in them, although apart from saying they were talking to potential partners from the US and the EU, he refused to provide further details. “We are now in the commercial negotiation phase and shortlisting partners who can help us scale,” he said. “Our goal is to conclude these partnerships within the year.”
The move comes as the development of datacentre facilities intensifies across the continent. South Africa has historically been the largest market on the continent with 56 datacentres, according to Datacentermap. But as international bandwidth, IT services, cloud and smartphone adoption have all grown, alongside a heightened sense for national data sovereignty and reduced latency, the demand for datacentre facilities in regional hubs has grown.
The two largest colocation datacentre operators in the world have both have datacentre facilities in Africa – Equinix has facilities in South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana, while digital Realty also has facilities in those countries, as well as Kenya and Mozambique.
In recent weeks, Kenya’s iXAfrica Data Centre announced an investment from Rand Merchant Bank to help finance the further development of datacentre facilities in that country, while Airtel broke ground on a datacentre facility also in Kenya. But beyond the datacentres designed for cloud workloads, AI factories are an emerging trend and found within datacentres.
AI factories rely on purpose-built systems infrastructure that includes GPUs, specialised networking, cooling and software, and provide cloud-accessible AI services. Last week, executive chair of Cassava Technologies, Strive Masiyiwa announced plans to develop five AI factories across the continent, also within a year. And although Vodacom hasn’t specifically announced plans, its group CIO did say in April that the telco group was investing in its infrastructure to democratise AI.
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