Pan-African tech firm Cassava Technologies has announced plans to build the continent’s first ‘AI factory’ in South Africa.

This will see NVIDIA computing and artificial intelligence (AI) software being deployed at the company’s data centres in South Africa from June 2025. Other data centres in Nigeria, Kenya, Morocco and Egypt will follow suit.

The firm, founded by Zimbabwean businessman Strive Masiyawa, said its accelerated computing platforms will play a crucial role in Africa’s AI ecosystem.

Cassava's high-performance AI Factory aims to allow African businesses and governments to develop local solutions to local challenges, enabling them to build, train, scale and deploy AI in a secure environment, while remaining compliant with local and global regulations.

“Building digital infrastructure for the AI economy is a priority if Africa is to take full advantage of the fourth industrial revolution,” Masiyiwa said.

“Our AI Factory provides the infrastructure for this innovation to scale, empowering African businesses, startups and researchers with access to cutting-edge AI infrastructure to turn their bold ideas into real-world breakthroughs - and now, they don’t have to look beyond Africa to get it,” he added.

NVIDIA’s Vice President of the EMEA region, Jaap Zuiderveld, said AI was helping Africa to solve some of its greatest challenges in agriculture, healthcare, energy and financial services, among other industries.

Furthermore, Cassava claims its data centres are designed to be energy efficient, using less electricity to power its AI computing workloads.

Internationally, data centres have come under fire for the high energy loads needed for training and operating AI models, as well as water consumption for cooling.

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