17/11/2025
Building deeper into AI with visionary global and local partners
__Igniting Africa's AI future!
Today I’m excited to share key announcements I made in Cape Town at the 2025 Africa Tech Festival. It was a huge week for our AI company, Cassava AI, which I launched on this very platform and LinkedIn several months ago.
The three-day event was attended by tens of thousands of IT professionals from across Africa and the world, including mobile network operators, investors, and tech companies of all kinds. Entrepreneurs of all ages who had launched start-ups were also invited to attend to learn more about the tech industry, pitch on stage, and in some cases, to find investors. IT officials and experts representing many African countries also participated.
During Tuesday's keynote presentation on our Cassava AI Factory, I was joined by our Cassava Technologies CEO and President, Hardy Pemhiwa. One of our new partners from Accenture also briefly joined us to talk about our shared vision to deliver sovereign AI enterprise solutions enabled by powerful new GPUs. We appreciate the time they took to take part.
On my platform here I don't usually do this, but today I especially want the to learn about the importance of in growing a vision from idea to ex*****on.
To do this, instead of "telling you” the news [as excited as I am to do so]... I am going to "show you" actual press releases in the Afterthoughts below. Not all share news from this week, but most do!
I generally write to you here in my own words, as you know... However, as an , you need to understand that formal partnership agreements and memorandums of understanding often require a great deal of time and discussion to put together, word by word.
This collaborative is to ensure each party agrees to all the specific details, including even the wording of official press statements that are sent out to share the exciting news with the world, when the time is right.
The will understand that these negotiation generally involve a high-level team, in this case, the top leadership of several of our companies were involved, as well as key people in our partner companies.
Now I DID want to share with you at least one big development myself: the important news this week that NVIDIA announced Cassava AI as Africa’s first preferred “NVIDIA Cloud Partner” [known as NCP] to grow the continent's AI ecosystem. [See press release in Afterthought 2].
Already some of Africa's largest companies, including telecom groups and banks, are signing contracts to lease capacity, which we call "GPU-as-a-Service" (GPUaaS).
So far we have also had about two dozen African AI start-ups approach us for "AI-compute" to accelerate their amazing businesses. I'm especially excited about innovation and research opportunities in education, agriculture, and health sectors.
Finally, a few days ago I shared with you here another major announcement: that Google selected Cassava Technologies to be its strategic partner to help roll out data-free access to Google Gemini across several African countries, together with local MNOs.
Here's the link to the video from Google we showed at Tuesday's presentation: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1997016601079400
No one can now say Africa has not joined the AI race!
As Jensen Huang said when I went to see him to discuss our ambitions: “You have made it possible for Africa to be at ground zero with everyone else. There is no need for Africa to feel left behind”.
Thank you all for the support. This is just the first step! We have a plan to expand this to every African country that welcomes us and shares our vision to deploy technology to power innovation, augment productivity, co-create solutions, accelerate opportunities, and grow prosperity, leaving no African behind.
Stay tuned for more soon.
Image credit: Kobus Van Neikerk/Cassava Technologies
