Billionaire Strive Masiyiwa’s Liquid Intelligent borrows $50M

Liquid Intelligent Technologies has borrowed $50 million from the Emerging Africa and Asia Infrastructure Fund, part of a $450 million restructuring and expansion programme at the company that operates the largest independent fibre backbone on the continent.

The loan was announced on Tuesday. It will fund optimisation of the company’s capital structure and continued maintenance of a network running more than 110,000 kilometres across 25 African countries, including Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Liquid is a subsidiary of Cassava Technologies, the group founded by the Zimbabwean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa. It sells capacity to telecommunications operators, corporate customers and large cloud service providers.

Hardy Pemhiwa, Cassava’s group chief executive, called the arrangement a financial and strategic milestone and said strengthening the balance sheet would be decisive in supporting further network expansion.

Martijn Proos, co-head of alternative credit for emerging markets at Ninety One, which manages EAAIF, said a reliable digital network forms the backbone of every modern economy and described the loan as reflecting confidence in pan-African digital corridors.

Why the balance sheet needed work

Fibre is a capital-intensive business with a long payback. Laying cable across 25 countries requires enormous upfront spending, and the revenue arrives over decades in the form of capacity leases. Companies in the sector typically borrow heavily and then spend years managing the maturity profile of that debt rather than the debt itself.

Liquid has been doing exactly that.

The company completed a $660 million debt financing in the first half of this year, anchored by a $300 million Eurobond that was 2.5 times oversubscribed on Euronext Dublin. That level of demand for African infrastructure paper is notable in a market where investors have been cautious about frontier credit.

The EAAIF loan sits inside a wider $450 million programme covering refinancing and expansion.

Selling to the AI buildout

The customer base is shifting, and that is what the network is being maintained for.

Liquid entered an investment agreement with Nvidia in 2025 covering artificial intelligence infrastructure and data centres, positioning the group to supply the connectivity that AI workloads require. Earlier this year it announced a partnership with the American firm AXON Networks to deploy an operator-as-a-service platform across its terrestrial and subsea fibre.

Data centres cannot function without high-capacity fibre, and Africa’s are being built now. A company holding the continent’s largest independent backbone is positioned to sell into that regardless of which operators or cloud providers win.

That is a different business from selling internet capacity to telecommunications companies, which is how Liquid began.

Masiyiwa’s position

Masiyiwa founded Econet Wireless in Zimbabwe and spent five years in the courts fighting the government for a licence, winning a constitutional case that established the right to operate. He built the group into telecommunications, financial services and technology businesses across the continent, and later separated the technology assets into Cassava.

He and his wife Tsitsi signed the Giving Pledge, committing at least half their wealth to philanthropy, and are among a small group of African signatories that includes Patrice Motsepe and Mohammed Dewji.

He has lived in London for years and sits on the boards of several international institutions.