Cassava Technologies is preparing to invest up to $720m to establish Africa’s first AIfactory, which will be developed in collaboration with US-based GPU manufacturer Nvidia, Bloomberg has reported.
The pan-African technology firm, founded by Zimbabwean telecoms entrepreneur Strive Masiyiwa, aims to roll out Nvidia’s accelerated computing and AI software across several African countries, including South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya and Morocco.
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The publication cited Cassava president and group chief executive Hardy Pemhiwa as saying in an interview: “If we don’t take the first step to deploy our own capital, however limited it may be, we can’t expect others to go first. This is about ensuring that Africa doesn’t get left behind.”
South Africa will be the first country to host the AI-powered data centres, the publication added.
The initial phase will see the deployment of 3,000 of Nvidia’s graphic processing units (GPUs) by June 2025.
Pemhiwa said: “We intend over the next three to four years to install 12,000 of them across Africa, starting with the 3,000 in South Africa.
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By GlobalData“The GPUs themselves are like laying fiber, the investment is really about building the whole AI ecosystem.”
The cost of a single GPU is estimated to range between $45,000 and $60,000.
Nvidia currently controls approximately 93% of the global GPU market.
Pemhiwa added that one of the benefits of the partnership is the potential to sell surplus computing capacity to other Nvidia cloud clients globally.
“There isn’t anybody that has built an ecosystem beyond GPUs and the AI factory is basically the main thing that Nvidia does throughout the world,” he added.
The AI infrastructure will be made available to researchers in universities, technology start-ups, developers, and governments, with sectors such as healthcare and financial technology among the key focus areas.
In March 2025, Nvidia held talks to acquire Lepton AI, a company specialising in renting out servers powered by Nvidia’s AI chips in a deal valued at several hundred million dollars.
