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Strive Masiyiwa, the founder and executive chairman of Econet Global, has launched Econet AI as a standalone business unit built to accelerate artificial intelligence adoption across Zimbabwe's economy. Unveiled on April 17, 2026, the move shifts AI inside the group from an internal innovation hub into a commercial product suite aimed at companies, creators and individual users. The launch is one of the clearest signals yet that Masiyiwa wants his flagship telecoms group positioned at the front of Africa's AI build-out.
Free Gemini access opens the door for everyday users
To drive early uptake, Masiyiwa is giving customers six months of free access to Google Gemini starting in May. The multimodal platform lets users work across text, audio, images and code, positioning it as a core productivity tool for everyday users and small businesses. By cutting the cost of entry to high-end AI, Econet AI is betting it can spark fresh activity among corporate teams and independent creators who have so far watched from the sidelines.
Cassava AiCloud anchors the enterprise play on Nvidia GPUs
On the enterprise side, the unit rolled out Cassava AiCloud, a high-performance computing platform that runs on Nvidia GPUs to handle heavy, data-intensive workloads. The service is hosted at the Cassava AI Factory in South Africa, still the only specialized facility of its kind on the continent. That infrastructure sits at the center of Masiyiwa's push to build a sovereign African AI ecosystem, one that keeps sensitive data and compute cycles inside African borders rather than in foreign hyperscaler clouds.
Cassava Technologies, a subsidiary of the wider Econet Group, has spent the last five years building these capabilities in-house, using AI to sharpen network performance and tighten business decision-making across the operator's core markets. The formal launch of Econet AI signals that the technology is now mature enough to serve external customers, and that the group believes regional enterprise demand has reached commercial scale.
Masiyiwa bets on a sovereign African AI stack
Masiyiwa is also drawing on other parts of his portfolio, including Africa Data Centres, to scale the physical capacity behind these services. Through an alliance with Nvidia, the group is building AI factories and sovereign cloud solutions tailored for African governments, keeping data and compute on the continent. As Zimbabwe pushes to modernize its economy, Econet AI is set up to be a primary engine of that shift, with Masiyiwa wagering that local ownership of the AI stack is as strategic as any mobile license his group has ever held.
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