Cassava to Invest $720 Million in Africa’s First AI Factory in Partnership with NVIDIA
Cassava Technologies, the pan-African tech powerhouse founded by Zimbabwean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa, is set to invest up to US$720 million (approximately R14 billion) in Africa’s first Artificial Intelligence (AI) Factory, built in partnership with global AI leader NVIDIA.
Cassava CEO Hardy Pemhiwa confirmed the ambitious investment, noting that the initiative will create a full AI ecosystem targeting universities, startups, and developers across sectors like healthcare, fintech, and government.
“If we don’t take the first step to deploy our own capital, however limited it may be, we can’t expect others to go first,” Pemhiwa said, underscoring Africa’s urgent need to lead its digital transformation.
The AI Factory’s first deployment — featuring 3,000 NVIDIA GPUs — is slated for South Africa by June 2025, with plans to scale up to 12,000 GPUs across additional data centres in Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, and Morocco within the next four years. Each GPU unit costs between $45,000 and $60,000, making the infrastructure investment as strategic as it is massive.
“This investment is about building the whole AI ecosystem. The GPUs are like laying fibre — essential infrastructure,” Pemhiwa added.
As an NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP), Cassava will also offer its high-performance AI infrastructure to clients globally, optimizing capacity and making Africa a player in the global AI economy.
