Chris Erasmus, AWS's country general manager for South Africa, delivering his keynote address at the AWS Summit 2024.

As Amazon Web Services (AWS), headquartered in the US, celebrates its 20th anniversary in Africa, the business underlined its commitment to extending its Cloud and Artificial Intelligence services in the region, with an additional $1.7 billion investment budget slated to be deployed by 2029.

Speaking at the AWS Summit 2024 in Johannesburg, South Africa, Chris Erasmus, AWS country general manager for South Africa, said: "The AWS community in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is thriving; we have thousands of AWS customers in SSA today, and we see this as an incredibly strategic area of growth for us."

 He continued, "We have over 6000 partners who are helping us build and deliver our business value." 

Erasmus pointed out that the Cape Town region in South Africa alone has over 160 AWS access services, and the company would continue to expand. 

AWS marked its 20th anniversary in the continent yesterday, sharing some of its African milestones. 

Starting with South Africa in 2019, AWS said it had set an ambitious target of powering 100% of its infrastructure with renewable energy.

According to Erasmus, AWS has met that objective seven years ahead of schedule, and in South Africa alone, it has launched a solar plant in Northern Cape Province.

He said the plant produces up to 28,000 megawatt-hours (MWh) of renewable energy per year, which is equivalent to the annual electricity usage of approximately 8,000 ordinary South African houses. 

At the Summit, AWS also unveiled ambitious plans to promote AI use in the region.

The business demonstrated some of its Generative AI (GenAI) capabilities using Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that provides foundation models (FMs) from  AI companies via a single application programming interface (API).

During his presentation, David Brown, vice president of AWS Compute and Networking Services, said AWS is at the forefront of generative AI, making it more accessible and user-friendly.

He said: ‘’Generative AI gives us a whole new software component, the ability to reason and it stands to completely revolutionize how we approach some of the world's largest challenges across nearly every industry.

‘’We're breaking through technology barriers and making generative AI accessible and easy to use."

He promised that the company will continue to grow its activities across other African markets and in South Africa.

At the conference, AWS also highlighted client success stories, such as Goldfields, JSE, and Adobe, to demonstrate the transformative power of AWS cloud and AI technologies.