(Bloomberg) — Cassava Technologies may invest as much as $720 million in Africa’s first artificial intelligence factory that will be built by Nvidia Corporation.
The pan-African technology firm founded by Zimbabwean telecoms tycoon Strive Masiyiwa plans to deploy accelerated computing and AI software from the US company into South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, and Morocco.
“If we don’t take the first step to deploy our own capital, however limited it maybe, we can’t expect others to go first,” Hardy Pemhiwa, the president and group chief executive at Cassava, said in an interview. “This is about ensuring that Africa doesn’t get left behind.”
South Africa will be the first recipient of the AI-powered data centers with 3,000 graphic processing units, or GPUs, from Nvidia deployed by June.
“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,” Pemhiwa said. “The GPUs themselves are like laying fiber, the investment is really about building the whole AI ecosystem.”
A single GPU costs between $45,000 and $60,000.
Nvidia, which controls 93% of the GPU market globally, was a natural choice for Cassava as they “are market leaders,” according to Pemhiwa. Another attraction is Cassava can sell excess capacity to other Nvidia cloud clients wherever they are in the world.
“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,” Pemhiwa added.
Cassava’s African AI factory will target researchers in universities, start-ups and developers in various sectors including health, fintech, and governments.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Corporation has pulled back on data center projects around the world, suggesting the company is taking a harder look at its plans to build the server farms powering artificial intelligence and the cloud, Bloomberg News reported last week.
