Cassava plans 20MW Joburg AI factory as Cape Town goes live

Strive Masiyiwa’s Cassava Technologies is moving to build a second AI factory in Johannesburg, with a 20 megawatt capacity target, as its first facility in Cape Town prepares to go live after more than a year of development, according to an interview with the company’s South Africa chief published by ITWeb on May 4.

The Cape Town factory, announced by Masiyiwa in March 2025 and powered by Nvidia’s AI platform, is in final stages before launch. Ziaad Suleman, CEO of Cassava South Africa and Botswana, told ITWeb that the first deployment is already in place and the facility will become fully operational within 4 to 6 weeks as additional services are brought online. The Johannesburg facility, he said, is next.

“The attraction to what we are building has been immense and very exciting. Based on that demand, the Johannesburg AI factory is just around the corner. We want to get Cape Town fully operational, and then scale quickly,” Suleman said.

The Johannesburg site will leverage Cassava’s existing data centre footprint, where the company says it already has space for a 20MW installation. That capacity would make it a significantly larger operation than Cape Town when complete.

The continental picture

The South African buildout is the opening move in what Masiyiwa’s team has framed as an Africa-wide GPU deployment strategy. Suleman put a specific target on it: between 12,000 and 13,000 GPUs deployed across the continent. Nigeria and Kenya are natural next steps, as Cassava already holds data centre presence in both countries. North Africa, specifically Morocco and Egypt, is also under evaluation. The company will announce country-specific locations when the rollout plan is finalised.

“Our connectivity spans over 110,000km of fibre across the continent, supported by subsea cables, satellite and microwave links,” Suleman said. “When you combine that with our data centres and AI compute capabilities, you have a complete digital ecosystem. That is what enables true digital transformation.”

The company is offering GPU-as-a-Service and AI-as-a-Service through the factories, removing the need for African businesses, governments and researchers to procure and operate their own high-performance computing infrastructure.

Nvidia’s definition of an AI factory is a specialised computing system built to turn data into intelligence, managing the full AI lifecycle from data collection and model training to fine-tuning and deployment. Unlike a conventional data centre, which handles general computing, an AI factory is purpose-built for the kind of intensive workloads that large language models and machine learning applications require. For African organisations seeking to develop AI products without importing intelligence from overseas infrastructure, local AI factories represent a meaningful shift in what is accessible.

Who owns Cassava and why it matters

Cassava Technologies is the digital services group that Masiyiwa built from the infrastructure of Liquid Intelligent Technologies, originally Liquid Telecom, his pan-African fibre connectivity business. Both sit within the broader Econet Group, which Masiyiwa founded in Zimbabwe in 1993 after a protracted 5-year legal battle with the government to win a telecoms licence against a state monopoly. That fight, which he pursued through the courts while the government resisted at every step, eventually produced Zimbabwe’s first private mobile operator and set the template for everything Masiyiwa has built since.

The Cassava group now encompasses fintech through Cassava Fintech, messaging through Sasai, ride-hailing through Vaya Africa and payments through KamiPay, in addition to the data centre and connectivity businesses. Google and Nvidia are both confirmed shareholders in Cassava Technologies, a combination of institutional backing that strengthens the company’s technology credentials and gives its AI factory programme access to the most advanced GPU architecture currently available to commercial operators.

Masiyiwa’s net worth has been estimated at between $800 million and $1.7 billion by different sources, reflecting the difficulty of valuing an empire of privately held subsidiaries spread across 40 countries.

The workforce dimension

The expansion announcement arrives alongside a more uncomfortable disclosure. Last month, Cassava confirmed that its subsidiary Liquid Intelligent Technologies South Africa had offered employees voluntary retrenchment packages as part of what the company described as a strategic transformation toward a more agile, solutions-driven operating model. The restructuring reflects the same underlying dynamic driving the AI factory expansion: a shift away from traditional connectivity provision toward higher-margin digital and computing services that require different skill sets and a different cost structure.

Suleman acknowledged the tension directly. “These initiatives create real opportunity because they enable developers and partners to solve on-the-ground challenges. As they build solutions, they require teams to execute, and we also need teams to support and scale the platform. That is how employment and entrepreneurship start to grow.”

South Africa’s AI infrastructure race has been moving quickly. Dell Technologies launched the country’s first announced AI factory in 2024. Altron launched what it described as the first operational AI factory in October 2025, also in partnership with Nvidia. Cassava’s Cape Town facility going live and the Johannesburg announcement add a third serious player to a market that, a year ago, had none.