• Cassava and Accenture to roll out sovereign AI, starting in South Africa, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, and Nigeria.

• Partnership combines Accenture’s AI Refinery with Cassava’s NVIDIA-powered GPU-as-a-Service in local data centers.

• Focus on local data processing, African languages, and sector use cases, with GDP gains modeled at 4.9pp by 2035 (PwC).

Cassava Technologies and Accenture announced on September 23, 2025, a partnership to deploy sovereign AI infrastructure across Africa. The rollout will begin in South Africa, before expanding to Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, and Nigeria. These markets were selected for their relatively stronger energy supply and data center ecosystems, factors seen as prerequisites for hosting energy-intensive AI workloads.

Accenture will contribute its AI Refinery platform and global expertise, while Cassava will provide GPU-as-a-Service through secure data centers built on NVIDIA infrastructure. The companies said the initiative is designed to deliver high-performance computing while keeping data within national borders and aligned with local regulatory requirements.

The infrastructure will ride on Cassava’s pan-African fiber network, enabling low-latency connections between data centers. By anchoring compute capacity in Africa, the companies aim to reduce reliance on overseas platforms and address a key barrier to AI adoption on the continent: limited access to high-performance compute.

The partnership also includes plans to embed African languages and cultural contexts into AI systems. The goal is to make applications relevant to industries such as finance, mining, agriculture, telecoms, and healthcare. Use cases highlighted include real-time fraud detection in mobile money, early crop disease identification via smartphone apps, and local processing of traffic data for smart city management.

Energy supply, infrastructure reliability, and cost remain critical considerations. Data centers require stable electricity, cooling, and connectivity, and costs can be prohibitive for smaller businesses. By starting in markets with more established energy and infrastructure capacity, Cassava and Accenture intend to mitigate these risks.

The collaboration comes amid national digital strategies across Africa, including broadband expansion and e-government services. Sovereign AI is framed as the next step, with governments and companies seeking to ensure sensitive data is stored and processed locally.

According to PwC research, Africa could see its GDP rise by up to 4.9 percentage points by 2035 through responsible AI adoption. The Cassava–Accenture initiative positions itself as part of this trajectory, with the companies projecting that job creation in data science, engineering, and digital services will accompany the build-out of AI infrastructure.

Hikmatu Bilali