Introduction.

A journey of a thousand miles often starts with a single step. As the global tech giants continue to invest billions of dollars in building more sophisticated AI data centers, Africa can not afford to be left out. In this article, we dive into how Africa is collaborating with a leading player in the market to change the narrative of AI development on the continent.

For a long time, there have been only 81 GPUs in the entire African region. GPU stands for graphics processing unit. It’s a higher version of a CPU – central processing unit. A CPU is a hardware chip that is core for computational tasks in a server, while the GPU  is mainly capable of handling more complex computations in parallel to the CPU. Due to its strong capabilities, the latter is suitable for use in data centers designed for processing large amounts of data in training AI models. 

Cassava Technologies is a company under the chairmanship of Strive Masiyiwa. A leading techprenuer on the African continent. Through its partnership with NVIDIA, a global leading company in the manufacturing of GPUs, Cassava Technologies is building five regional data centers in African countries for processing African AI data. According to Strive, the whole project was to take three years to complete, but in November 2025, the Cape Town center went live, while the other four shall be completed by December 2026. The four are in Kenya, Egypt, Nigeria, and Morocco.

Why are the GPU regions important for Africa?

1. High Latency.

In a continent with the highest number of young people, a lot of data will be generated through various gadgets, as we are in the era of computers and mobile phones. Currently, youths are relying on AI data centers stored in other continents to develop various AI projects for Africa. This does not happen without shortcomings. It’s known that data centers that are far from the users have a high rate of latency, which could result in service disruptions that eventually affect the business operations. With the creation of data factories near the users, the rate of latency will be minimized, while service delivery is optimized. Additionally, more jobs will be created, which will fix the unemployment problem in Africa.

2. Data Protection Law.

In the African continent, 39 out of 55 countries have enacted data protection laws. Some of these acts discourage the movement of data from their own countries. With data factories within Africa, the countries will be in a better control position than when data is processed outside the continent. This is crucial because most African cultures and practices are generally cultivated rather than individualized. These cultures are part of the African data bank. 

3. Data Subjected to Foreign Laws.

Another challenge is that, when data of a country is handled in a foreign country, it may be subject to the laws of that country. This means that the native data owner might have little control over what the other country does with their data. That is a loss of National sovereignty over data U.S. CLOUD Act (2018). It can only be corrected when these data centers are completed, and every country will have confidence while knowing that its data is within reach. Additionally, citizens lose privacy through the violation of protections that are guaranteed by their constitution.

Conclusion

The future of African computing is promising, although it’s a journey that faces its own challenges to overcome. Data centers use a lot of power to run, and Africa needs to solve the issue of power outages to ensure that these cloud services are not disrupted, despite their benefits. The skill gap is another concern that needs to be addressed for the smooth running of the centers. Despite the challenges, we remain hopeful that this massive project will bring more benefits than costs. The benefits are for the African people.