In an attempt to address limited infrastructure challenges as the world races to embrace the transformative potential of AI, Itana, touted as Africa’s first digital Economic Zone, is launching a full-stack growth hub for businesses.
Announced on Monday, Itana’s full-stack growth hub for AI and data companies is designed to empower local founders, engineers, and researchers to build and scale transformative technologies in Africa.
According to a statement from the company, it will also provide local access to scalable graphics processing units (GPUs), compliant data storage, machine learning operations (MLOps) talent, and regulatory support, enabling AI and data ventures to operate without friction.
Itana notes that while other global markets invest billions into infrastructure such as computing capacity, sovereign data storage, and cloud infrastructure, Africa remains constrained.
The economic hub adds that training a large language model (LLM) in Nigeria still means paying for GPUs hosted abroad, and storing sensitive data locally is often prohibitively expensive, said Itana.
As such, the full-stack growth hub will feature cost effective GPU compute for local and regional clusters for LLM training, fine-tuning and deployment. While offering data infrastructure that is compliant, low-latency data storage aligned with local regulations, talent pipeline, with access to vetted MLOps engineers, AI developers, and data scientists.
A regulatory navigation that provides support for data/IP governance, licensing, and compliance, lastly, capital and acceleration, with credits, start-up grants, and access to aligned investor.
Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, general partner at Future Africa, an investor in Itana, says is crucial for the continent to have home-grown infrastructure.
He said: “Africa will not win in the AI age by consuming what the rest of the world builds. We’ll win by creating the infrastructure that allows our people to build for themselves. What Itana is doing with this AI/Data Hub is laying the foundation for a sovereign, globally competitive tech future. This is how we take our place at the frontier.”
Mayowa Olugbile, Itana’s CEO added: “Africa is at a critical juncture when it comes to AI, Africa has many of the problems AI was made to solve, such as inefficient logistics and fragmented public services, but lacks the infrastructure needed to harness the potential of AI.
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