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Strive Masiyiwa's Cassava Technologies has backed a new foundation in Kigali that will provide grant-funded access to computing power, research support and skills training for African AI builders, extending the billionaire's continental AI infrastructure push into a direct program for developers and researchers.
The AI Skills and Compute Africa Foundation, known as AISCA Foundation, launched Wednesday in Rwanda's capital, with Cassava named as its founding technology and compute partner. The Kigali headquarters positions the foundation within Rwanda's growing cluster of frontier-technology institutions, alongside the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Africa CEO Forum.
AISCA's founding argument is direct. African AI talent is not the constraint. Access to the infrastructure needed to build at scale is. "Africa has the talent, ideas, and urgency to lead in applied AI. What has often been missing is access to compute, coordinated ecosystem support, contextualised data sets, and scalable pathways into dignified economic opportunities," said Isobel Acquah, AISCA Foundation CEO.
Cassava CEO Hardy Pemhiwa framed the partnership as making the group's existing AI infrastructure investment accessible to a broader pool of African builders. "While Cassava has invested millions of dollars in setting up AI infrastructure, supporting AISCA through enabling access to dedicated compute ensures that we are empowering African youth in utilising the rails to create localised value for their communities in practical and impactful ways," Pemhiwa said.
The sovereign compute framing is central to AISCA's pitch. The foundation says its infrastructure, provided in partnership with Cassava, is designed so that data and processing never leave African borders, directly addressing a recurring concern in African AI policy discussions about dependency on foreign cloud regions.
Cassava, which launched Africa's first NVIDIA-powered AI factory in South Africa in March 2026 and is planning a second facility in Johannesburg, now has a dedicated pathway for African developers to access that computing capacity through AISCA's grant program. A continent-wide GPU deployment targeting 12,000 to 13,000 units across Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and Morocco is also in progress.
AISCA has set three numerical targets: one million young people transitioned into work across the AI value chain, 25,000 AI Native Innovators awarded compute grants to build AI-enabled solutions, and 10,000 AI researchers awarded compute grants and technical assistance.
Dr Agnes Kalibata, who chairs the AISCA board, argued at the launch that Africa must develop AI tooling that addresses its own challenges rather than relying on imported solutions. The foundation's four pillars cover sovereign compute, curated African datasets across agriculture, health and climate, capacity-building across the AI skills value chain and a pan-African community to mentor technical talent.
Grant applications are open through aiscafrica.org. No timeline against which the foundation's targets will be measured was stated at the launch.
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