Zimbabwean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa's Cassava builds out 12,000-GPU Nvidia AI network

Cassava Technologies, the pan-African digital infrastructure group controlled by Zimbabwean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa, is pressing ahead with a plan to put 12,000 Nvidia graphics processors to work across Africa, a build-out the company says will cost up to $720 million.

The company has the chips. Masiyiwa said in November last year that Cassava had acquired the 12,000 Nvidia GPUs and flown them in on about 28 containerised shipments. The first of its so-called AI factories, in Cape Town, is now running, and the group is lining up sites in Johannesburg, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria.

"They told us there were only 80 Nvidia GPUs on the African continent," Masiyiwa said at the Africa Tech Festival in Johannesburg in November 2025, where Cassava launched what it called Africa's first GPU-as-a-service offering.

The plan, first announced in March 2025, calls for 3,000 GPUs in South Africa in the first phase. The remaining 9,000 are to follow in Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco and Egypt over three to four years. Nvidia and Google are both shareholders in Cassava.

From Cape Town to Cairo

Masiyiwa said in March that construction of the Cape Town factory had begun. By May, Ziaad Suleman, chief executive of Cassava's South Africa and Botswana operations, said the site had its first deployment in place and was about to go live. He also said the group planned a second South African factory, a 20-megawatt installation at an existing data centre in Johannesburg.

"Our aspiration is to deploy between 12,000 and 13,000 GPUs across the continent," Suleman said.

Egypt is next in line. On Sept. 8, Cassava, Vodafone and Elsewedy Electric announced Africa Data Centres Egypt, a venture that will start with 20 megawatts of capacity over three years and aims to reach 200 megawatts. The first phase carries about $200 million of investment, rising to $1 billion once the full capacity is built. A separate project between Cassava and Vodafone Business will give Egypt what the partners call its first sovereign AI data centre, running on Nvidia technology and offering GPU capacity as a service.

In October, the World Bank named Cassava and Nvidia as knowledge partners in a new initiative to give governments in emerging markets shared, pay-as-you-go access to GPUs, starting with Africa and Latin America.

Selling the software too

Cassava is also selling the AI models that will run on the hardware. On Oct. 27, it became an authorized reseller of Anthropic's Claude models through Amazon Bedrock, giving African companies a local partner to buy and build with them. The group already works with Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Anthropic through Cassava AI, a business unit set up in London in 2024.

"What matters to our customers is being able to use AI in their business," said Hardy Pemhiwa, Cassava's president and group chief executive.

The AI push sits on top of an older network business. Cassava owns Liquid Intelligent Technologies, which runs more than 110,000 kilometers of fiber across Africa, as well as Africa Data Centres and the cloud unit Liquid C2. The group says it operates in more than 40 markets in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

Masiyiwa's bet

Masiyiwa, 65, built his fortune with Econet Wireless, which he founded in Zimbabwe in the 1990s after a five-year legal fight with the government for a mobile license. He spun Cassava out of the Econet group and has since made artificial intelligence the center of its strategy.

He is the richest man in Zimbabwe, with a fortune Forbes estimates at about $2.1 billion. He lives in London and chairs both Econet and Cassava.