AI investments key to sustaining Africa’s telecoms growth – Cassava Tech

At a time when Africa is witnessing significant internet penetration powered by increased smartphone adoption and more time spent on apps and social media, the need for AI investment in telecoms has been tipped to capture the growing number of internet users in Africa.

According to Hardy Pemhiwa, CEO and Group President of Cassava Technologies, the company is increasingly building digital infrastructure across Africa. This includes AI investment such as data centres, AI computing infrastructure, and AI factories.

During a panellist session at the Africa CEO Forum Annual Summit in Kigali, Pemhiwa said the future demand on Africa’s telecom networks will be enormous, in terms of subscribers, and Cassava is already creating a facility that carries all the data. 

“25 years ago, 70% of Africans had never heard a phone ring, and it’s an incredible transformation to be sitting in markets with significant penetration and people having multiple SIM cards,” he said.  

Pemhiwa stressed that Africa needs digital plumbing (infrastructure) that carries the data, which enables Africa’s telecoms revolution. And as a matter of fact, the plumbing is essential for the growth of AI facilities across the continent.

While Africa’s telecoms revolution is largely driven by mobile phones and undersea cables connecting Africa to the world, there’s need for expansion to accommodate the growing penetration. For AI to come to the rescue, there’s a need for more fibre, data centres, and local capacity.

Cassava’s footprints

Africa still lacks infrastructure such as data centres and undersea fibre cables. Pemhiwa identifies this as the next investment frontier to successfully run AI locally instead of depending on or running it from the rest of the world. 

The positive side is that Cassava Technologies is leading in building these infrastructures across Africa. 

According to Pemhiwa, the company has been building infrastructure across Africa over the past three decades, including laying 116,000 km of fibre network, building renewable energy plants for enterprises and data centres construction across Africa to date, and possesses data across these networks.

In the project, Nvidia will integrate its AI software by embedding NVIDIA Cloud Partner reference architectures and deploy hundreds of GPUs, which power its high-performance supercomputers.

Also, its first AI factory is already completed in South Africa and will run on 3,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs). In the $720m project, four AI factories are expected to be built in Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco and Egypt. 

Also Read: Cassava Technologies plan to build 5 AI facilities across Africa worth $720m.

The battle for access

Leading African telecoms operators, like MTN, Airtel Africa, Vodacom, Orange and others, are increasingly deploying infrastructure across several African markets, but accessibility is still lagging.

At the sideline, Pemhiwa noted that while the war for coverage is getting defeated, subscribers’ access to these networks remains the next battle. And this happens when demand for a network outweighs supply.

For instance, 5G accessibility in Africa is still at a slow pace. South Africa currently has one of the continent’s most advanced 5G deployments, while others are still catching up.

A recent Quality of Experience (QoE) data revealed that about 7 in 10 people who own 5G-enabled smartphones in Nigeria’s biggest cities cannot connect to the 5G network. At such times when the connection stalls, the phone locates the nearest network available (4G or 3G) and stays there. 

For now, Africa will continue building the infrastructure for its growing telecoms population while ensuring accessibility matches coverage.