African technology company Cassava Technologies has announced that it plans to build Africa’s first artificial intelligence (AI) factory — a powerful and super-secure data centre facility powered with AI computing technology from multinational corporation and technology company Nvidia.
This, says Cassava, will give African businesses, governments and researchers access to cutting-edge AI computing capacity — helping them develop smarter AI products, streamline operations and stay competitive in a fast-changing world. Cassava adds that it provides the supercomputers and software needed to train AI while keeping data within Africa’s borders.
Cassava plans to deploy Nvidia accelerated computing and AI software using Nvidia Cloud Partner (NCP) reference architectures, at its data centres in South Africa by June 2025, with expansion planned at its other data centre facilities in Egypt, Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria.
Cassava’s AI Factory will leverage the company’s pan-African high-speed, ultra-low-latency, fibre-optic network with sustainable data centres to deliver AI as a service (AIaaS). Cassava’s data centres are designed to be energy efficient, using less electricity to power AI computing workloads.
Nvidia GPU-based supercomputers will power the AI factory, enabling faster AI model training, fine-tuning and advanced inference capabilities. Cassava aims to be the first to introduce these accelerated computing platforms to Africa as an NCP, playing, it says, a crucial role in the continent’s AI ecosystem.
Cassava adds that, by using this secure, high-performance AI factory, African businesses and governments can develop local solutions to local challenges, enabling Africans to build, train, scale and deploy AI in a secure environment compliant with global and local regulations.
