Cassava Technologies Expands Nvidia GPU Deployment From South Africa Toward Nigeria, Egypt and Morocco

Cassava Technologies, the pan-African technology group founded by Zimbabwean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa, is expanding its Nvidia GPU deployment beyond South Africa, where an initial 3,000-GPU rollout went live in March 2026, with plans for 12,000 additional GPUs across Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya and Morocco under its broader $700 million partnership with the chipmaker.

The expansion positions Cassava as one of the most geographically ambitious GPU infrastructure operators on the continent, building AI compute capacity across multiple African markets simultaneously rather than concentrating investment in a single flagship facility, the more common approach taken by other large African data centre and AI infrastructure announcements this year, including Egypt's separate sovereign $1 billion Nvidia data centre initiative and South Africa's Teraco JB7 expansion.

### A private pan-African compute network

Where Egypt's Nvidia deal is a government-led sovereign compute initiative, Cassava's build-out is being pursued as private infrastructure, offered as GPU-as-a-service capacity to enterprises, telecom operators and AI startups across its target markets. The company has framed the strategy as addressing the same underlying compute-access gap driving GPU investment across Kenya, Nigeria and elsewhere: African businesses and developers have historically had to rent AI compute capacity from providers based outside the continent, adding cost, latency and data-sovereignty friction that a distributed in-continent GPU network is intended to reduce.

Cassava's broader business, spanning telecommunications infrastructure, fintech and now AI compute, gives it an existing operational footprint across the four expansion markets that few competitors can match, potentially allowing faster deployment than infrastructure operators building AI-specific capacity from scratch in each new market. The company has not disclosed a detailed country-by-country rollout schedule for the additional 12,000 GPUs, though officials indicated Nigeria and Egypt are expected to see initial capacity online before Kenya and Morocco, reflecting existing data centre infrastructure readiness in those markets.

The expansion adds Cassava to a small group of infrastructure operators — alongside Teraco in South Africa and Atlancis/iXAfrica in Kenya — building the physical GPU capacity increasingly seen as the binding constraint on African AI adoption, even as capital availability and startup demand for AI compute continue to grow faster than the continent's data centre and power infrastructure can currently support.