Cassava’s Masiyiwa Pledges to Fast-Track Africa’s AI Revolution with $720m Infrastructure Push

Strive Masiyiwa, founder and executive chairman of Cassava Technologies, has unveiled plans to accelerate Africa’s artificial intelligence (AI) adoption with a network of regional “AI factories” and a sovereign AI cloud offering.

“We expect to deliver the first five regional AI factories within 12 months,” Masiyiwa said, adding that the facilities will be located in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, and Morocco.

The initiative, backed by an expected $720 million investment, aims to close Africa’s AI infrastructure gap. According to Time magazine, only five percent of African AI talent currently has access to the computing power required for advanced research. Masiyiwa said the new facilities will give the continent’s businesses, start-ups and researchers the tools they need to compete globally.

“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,” he said.

Cassava has already partnered with Nvidia to roll out the project. The first facility in South Africa will feature 3,000 Nvidia GPUs, much of which has already been reserved by African AI practitioners.

Masiyiwa also announced the expansion of Cassava’s “Sovereign AI Cloud,” designed to address data sovereignty concerns. “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.

The company’s new AI unit, Cassava AI, is working with AWS, Microsoft, Google and Anthropic to provide services built on their platforms. Masiyiwa also confirmed a new partnership through Google 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,” he said. The deal gives African enterprises hybrid access to Google’s AI capabilities on-premises or via the cloud.

Masiyiwa framed the AI initiative as the next step in his long-standing drive to expand Africa’s digital economy. “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.

Cassava’s broader portfolio, including Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Liquid Cloud C2, Africa Data Centres and Cassava AI, will play a central role in delivering the infrastructure.

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