NCS
—
There’s pleasure effervescent in Kigali, Rwanda, forward of the Global AI Summit on Africa, which opens at present, promising financial alternatives and innovation.
Not least due to final week’s announcement from Cassava Technologies, a tech agency based by Zimbabwean telecoms billionaire Strive Masiyiwa, that it could be constructing Africa’s first “artificial intelligence factory,” in partnership with main AI chipmaker Nvidia.
Nvidia’s supercomputers, which use graphic processing models, or GPUs, (the chips that usually energy AI), will be deployed at Cassava’s information facilities in South Africa from as early as June, earlier than being rolled out throughout the firm’s different amenities in Egypt, Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria.
Africa has fallen behind the international AI growth due partially to a lack of computing energy. Analysis from Zindi, a neighborhood of 80,000 AI builders throughout 52 African international locations, discovered that solely 5% of Africa’s AI practitioners have entry to computational energy for analysis and innovation.
Better entry to GPUs will assist to “drive the AI revolution” throughout the continent, says Alex Tsado, founder and director of Alliance4AI, a non-profit that helps African establishments undertake rising applied sciences. Currently, there are not any huge GPU clusters in Africa and that is holding innovators again: “If you don’t have access to GPUs, it takes you many more hours, if not days, to build the same solutions (or AI systems) than it would take someone else who is in a place where they do have access (like the US or Europe),” he tells NCS.
“People start to see more reasons to gather data, because now they can process it; people start to see more reasons to train talent, because now there’s GPUs … (It) triggers the ecosystem to accelerate all the progress that they’ve already been making.”
While Cassava is but to disclose particulars of its deployment plan, it mentioned in a press launch that Nvidia’s GPU-based supercomputers will allow sooner AI mannequin coaching and that the information facilities will guarantee companies and researchers have entry to the AI computing energy required to construct, prepare, scale and deploy AI in a safe surroundings.
“Our AI factory provides the infrastructure for this innovation to scale, empowering African businesses, startups and researchers with access to cutting-edge AI infrastructure to turn their bold ideas into real-world breakthroughs — and now, they don’t have to look beyond Africa to get it,” mentioned Masiyiwa in the press launch.
The excessive value of {hardware} relative to earnings ranges in Africa has been one among the primary obstacles to AI adoption. Some of Nvidia’s strongest GPUs promote for as a lot as $40,000. According to AI4D, an African AI growth program, the worth of shopping for a GPU in Kenya represents 75% of GDP per capita, making it 31 occasions dearer than one in Germany, in relative phrases. This has led to a heavy reliance on overseas cloud providers, equivalent to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure – however these too are costly, because it prices extra, and takes longer, to transmit information between geographical areas.
For Zindi’s community of AI builders, the growth of native information facilities with Nvidia GPU-powered supercomputers will be a “game-changer,” based on Celina Lee, its CEO and co-founder.
“By establishing Africa-based AI infrastructure, ‘Zindians’ would benefit from more affordable compute resources, faster access to AI tools, and lower latency, making it easier to develop and deploy AI models efficiently,” she says.
Use of Nvidia’s cutting-edge know-how – the similar that’s utilized by OpenAI, Tesla, Meta, Google and different tech giants – will be a nice equalizer, she provides: “This would democratize AI development, strengthen local AI ecosystems, and drive innovation across industries like agriculture, healthcare, and financial services, enabling more homegrown solutions tailored to Africa’s unique challenges.”
It could additionally assist to extend Africa’s illustration in international AI coaching datasets. Currently, African languages and dialects are underrepresented on account of a lack of knowledge and there are sometimes biases in coaching information, equivalent to facial recognition systems that wrestle with darker pores and skin tones.
“With increased access to AI infrastructure, African practitioners could train models using local datasets that better represent diverse demographics, economic systems, and environments,” says Lee.
Tsado notes that there are nonetheless questions round how Cassava will overcome infrastructure challenges when constructing the factories – for occasion Africa’s unreliable energy grids, which have put folks off doing this earlier. And past entry to GPUs there are nonetheless challenges with African finish customers working AI fashions effectively due to their reliance on lower-grade smartphones with restricted entry to web apps, says Lee.
But each agree that Cassava’s transfer is a huge step in the proper route. “This is a very welcome boost that Africa’s big tech is finally joining the African AI communities … and spending some money on GPUs,” says Tsado. “Strive (Masiyiwa)’s announcement is the first big public commitment that’s been made, and it can trigger other people like him to do the same.”