• Masiyiwa’s Cassava to invest $720m in 5 AI factories, bringing 15k GPUs for Africa’s data sovereignty.
• 90% of Johannesburg's AI capacity is pre-booked; the goal is to achieve 50% researcher access by 2027, up from 5%.
• Cassava’s fibre and green data centres join Microsoft, IFC in Africa’s digital infrastructure race.

Strive Masiyiwa, the Zimbabwean billionaire and founder of Cassava Technologies, has unveiled a $720 million plan to construct five artificial intelligence factories across Africa, the most significant single private investment yet aimed at securing the continent’s control over advanced computing. The project marks a bold step in efforts to reduce reliance on overseas providers and keep sensitive data within African borders.

The first facility, now rising inside Cassava’s Africa Data Centres campus in Johannesburg, will house 3,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. More than 90% of that capacity has already been pre-reserved by African universities, banks, and start-ups, the company said. Once all five sites — in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, and Morocco — are operational, the cluster will provide 15,000 GPUs, sufficient to train large language models end-to-end without exporting data offshore.

An African Union–aligned survey in 2024 found that just 5% of the continent’s AI researchers had access to pre-training-grade GPU resources. Masiyiwa has set a target to raise that figure above 50% by the end of 2027. Meanwhile, funding tracker Africa: The Big Deal reports that from 2019 through early 2025, 87% of the $2.85 billion raised by African AI start-ups went to South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt — the same quartet chosen for Cassava’s new factories.

The infrastructure will sit on Cassava’s 100,000-kilometer fibre network and connect to twelve renewable-powered colocation halls operated by Africa Data Centres. Sister company Liquid Intelligent Technologies will provide last-mile links to major public cloud platforms. Cassava says the factories will run on power purchase agreements designed to make them carbon-negative.

The announcement comes amid an acceleration of digital investment across the region. The World Bank’s IFC committed $100 million to Raxio Group in April for additional data centre expansion. In March, Microsoft pledged 5.4 billion rand ($297 million) for new AI infrastructure in South Africa and to fund 50,000 certification exams. Despite this momentum, Africa still accounts for less than 1% of global data-centre floor space, according to Ericsson and Reuters, even as mobile data traffic is expanding at a rate of roughly 40% per year.

Cassava’s investor timeline indicates that the first GPU pods in Johannesburg are scheduled to accept workloads in Q3 2026, with the full five-factory network expected to be complete by Q4 2026. Masiyiwa’s public reference to services being live “within twelve months” refers to the countdown from the moment commercial operations begin, not from the date of announcement.

If delivered on schedule, the initiative would mark the first time an African-owned company offers sovereign, carbon-negative AI compute at scale, priced in local currency below prevailing AWS spot rates in Europe. Analysts say it could transform Africa from a net importer of digital infrastructure into an emerging producer — underscoring a broader contest to shape the future of artificial intelligence on the continent.

Idriss Linge