Cassava, backed by Nvidia, aims to make AI affordable across Africa

Key topics:Cassava plans $700m AI data centre expansion across Africa.Partnership with Rockefeller to lower AI costs for nonprofits.Initiative aims to boost African startups in agriculture, health, education..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Loni Prinsloo and Antony Sguazzin.Nvidia Corp.-backed Cassava Technologies plans to raise as much as $700 million to build and upgrade a network of data centers across Africa with artificial intelligence chips, with the goal of making AI services more affordable for companies and nonprofits, as well as some of the world’s poorest people. Cassava, a company founded by Zimbawean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa, will raise the money in the form of debt and equity, Chief Executive Officer Hardy Pemhiwa said in an interview. Pemhiwa didn’t provide additional details on the financing. The company aims to bring down the cost of AI in the region by equipping data centers with 12,000 Nvidia graphics processing units in facilities across Africa’s four regions, starting with South Africa for the southern region. The provision of AI technology from north, east and west Africa is expected to follow. .Read more:.Nvidia backs OpenAI with $100bn for next-gen AI powerhouses.Cassava is working with the Rockefeller Foundation on providing the technology to nonprofits and hopes it can help slash the price of agricultural, health and education services, in particular.“The partnership is about offering computer resources that are subsidised by us and Rockefeller in order to make sure that we can bring capacity to the AI startup ecosystem and encourage them to develop applications that solve African problems, using African data,” said Pemhiwa.The world’s leading technology firms have committed to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on data centres to build more powerful AI systems and support wider adoption. Currently, however, less than 1% of global data center capacity is in Africa. Yet, AI is quickly gaining ground on the continent, which is home to the world’s fastest growing and youngest population. With limited access to banking and other services, Africans are using technologies like AI to bridge gaps.Cassava’s initiative is designed to be a game changer for local organisations. The more successful a startup or nonprofit is, the more access it will get to discounted AI technology through a credit system, Pemhiwa said. “It’s a graduated scale,” he said. That plan was put together during talks at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center on the shores of Lake Como in Italy.“The latest advances in science and technology should serve everyone, not just the fortunate few,” Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, said in a statement. “That includes empowering African innovators with the tools they need to shape the continent’s future.”There are about 1,100 African startups in key social sectors, including agriculture and health, that are being considered, according to Pemhiwa. One of those is Digital Green, a nonprofit that advises subsistence and small-scale farmers on how to improve their productivity by recognizing diseases, treating them and employing better agricultural practices. It’s funded by the social responsibility arms of tech firms, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Microsoft Corp. and Meta Platforms Inc.Lower CostsFounded 19 years ago, the nonprofit once focused on showing educational videos to agricultural communities in person. Now it also answers WhatsApp queries in the form of text, pictures or video, using AI..Read more:.The Economist: DeepSeek disrupts Nvidia, competition heats up in AI chip war.The venture has managed to slash the cost of offering agricultural extension services to farmers from $35 per individual annually to 3.5 US cents. As a result, Digital Green has been able to expand its services to 8 million people across Africa and southeast Asia.“What we were doing previously with our video approach, farmers would just get one video every one to two weeks,” said Rikin Gandhi, Digital Green’s founder. “Here, they’re asking multiple questions every week.”If Cassava is able to lower AI costs as it plans, that will help the nonprofit expand further, Gandhi said.“These local AI factories are super critical on the continent because otherwise you end up having to incur much more expense by hitting servers and GPU clouds that are, say, in North America,” he said. “It’ll reduce latency and it will reduce cost.”.© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

Cassava, backed by Nvidia, aims to make AI affordable across Africa

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