Techbytes: Africa’s first ‘AI factory’ could be a breakthrough for the continent (CNN)

There’s excitement bubbling in Kigali, Rwanda, ahead of the Global AI Summit on Africa, which opens today [Thursday], promising economic opportunities and innovation, according to CNN.

Not least because of last week’s announcement from Cassava Technologies, a tech firm founded by Zimbabwean telecoms billionaire Strive Masiyiwa, that it would be building Africa’s first “artificial intelligence factory,” in partnership with leading AI chipmaker Nvidia.

Nvidia’s supercomputers, which use graphic processing units, or GPUs, (the chips that often power AI), will be deployed at Cassava’s data centers in South Africa from as early as June, before being rolled out across the company’s other facilities in Egypt, Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria.

Africa has fallen behind the global AI boom due in part to a lack of computing power.

Analysis from Zindi, a community of 80,000 AI builders across 52 African countries, found that only five percent of Africa’s AI practitioners have access to computational power for research and innovation.

Better access to GPUs will help to “drive the AI revolution” across the continent, says Alex Tsado, founder and director of Alliance4AI, a non-profit that helps African institutions adopt emerging technologies.

Currently, there are no big GPU clusters in Africa and this is holding innovators back: “If you don’t have access to GPUs, it takes you many more hours, if not days, to build the same solutions (or AI systems) than it would take someone else who is in a place where they do have access (like the US or Europe),” he tells CNN.

“People start to see more reasons to gather data, because now they can process it; people start to see more reasons to train talent, because now there’s GPUs … (It) triggers the ecosystem to accelerate all the progress that they’ve already been making.”
While Cassava is yet to divulge details of its deployment plan, it said in a press release that Nvidia’s GPU-based supercomputers will enable faster AI model training and that the data centers will ensure businesses and researchers have access to the AI computing power required to build, train, scale and deploy AI in a secure environment.

“Our AI factory provides the infrastructure for this innovation to scale, empowering African businesses, startups and researchers with access to cutting-edge AI infrastructure to turn their bold ideas into real-world breakthroughs — and now, they don’t have to look beyond Africa to get it,” said Masiyiwa in the press release.

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