Building Africa's AI Backbone: How Tony Elumelu and Strive Masiyiwa Are Democratizing Digital Infrastructure
By Pamela Y. Johnson | PYJDesigns Advisory Group
Africa's digital transformation is being shaped not by Silicon Valley investors or multilateral development banks, but by two visionary African business leaders who understand that true economic sovereignty requires indigenous technological infrastructure. Tony Elumelu and Strive Masiyiwa are making billion-dollar bets on a future where Africa builds, owns, and governs its own AI ecosystem.
The Infrastructure Imperative
When historians chronicle the pivotal moments in Africa's economic emergence, they will mark the period between 2024 and 2030 as the inflection point when the continent transitioned from technology consumer to technology creator. At the center of this transformation are two complementary forces: Tony Elumelu's advocacy for massive domestic capital mobilization and Strive Masiyiwa's $720 million infrastructure deployment through Cassava Technologies.
The stakes are existential. Without indigenous AI infrastructure, Africa risks becoming permanently dependent on foreign cloud providers, subject to data sovereignty concerns, algorithmic bias embedded in externally trained models, and economic value extraction at continental scale. The World Economic Forum estimates that AI could contribute $1.5 trillion to Africa's GDP by 2030—but only if African nations can participate as creators rather than mere consumers of AI technologies.
Two Leaders, One Vision: Digital Sovereignty
Tony Elumelu: Mobilizing African Capital for African Solutions
Tony Elumelu, founder of Heirs Holdings and the Tony Elumelu Foundation, has spent the past decade advancing a philosophy he calls "Africapitalism"—the principle that Africa's private sector must take the lead in the continent's economic transformation. His recent engagements across the continent reflect a matured understanding that digital infrastructure is now inseparable from economic sovereignty.
Elumelu's advocacy centers on a provocative thesis: Africa needs to mobilize $4 trillion in domestic capital over the next decade to fund its own development, with significant allocation toward digital infrastructure. This represents a fundamental departure from the aid-dependent paradigm that has characterized much of post-independence African development policy.
In his January 2025 address at the African Union Summit, Elumelu articulated the urgency: "We cannot build a prosperous Africa on borrowed technology and rented infrastructure. Every time an African startup stores its data on a foreign server, we are exporting our economic future."
His recent engagements across the continent focused on establishing public-private partnerships that could leverage domestic pension funds, sovereign wealth vehicles, and regional development banks to finance AI infrastructure buildout. The model being discussed would create AI innovation zones in strategic regional hubs—starting with Lusaka, Lagos, and Nairobi—that provide not just connectivity but also computing capacity, talent development pipelines, and regulatory sandboxes for AI experimentation.
Strive Masiyiwa: Building the Physical and Digital Rails
While Elumelu mobilizes capital and shapes policy discourse, Strive Masiyiwa is building the actual infrastructure. Through Cassava Technologies, Masiyiwa is deploying what may be the most significant privately financed technology infrastructure project in African history: a network of five AI factories spanning the continent, backed by strategic partnerships with NVIDIA and other global technology leaders.
The $720 million investment announced in late 2024 represents more than just data centers. Masiyiwa is constructing what he calls "Sovereign AI Clouds"—geographically distributed computing infrastructure designed specifically for African use cases, governed by African institutions, and optimized for African languages, contexts, and challenges.
The technical architecture is sophisticated. Each AI factory will house between 2,000 and 4,000 NVIDIA GPUs, providing the computational horsepower necessary for training large language models and running inference at scale. The facilities are being strategically located to leverage existing fiber optic infrastructure from Liquid Intelligent Technologies (also owned by Masiyiwa), which already operates over 100,000 kilometers of fiber across 16 African nations.
Critically, Masiyiwa's vision extends beyond mere infrastructure provision. Cassava Technologies is partnering with African universities and research institutions to ensure that the computing capacity serves local researchers, entrepreneurs, and developers. The model includes preferential pricing for African startups, dedicated capacity for government AI initiatives, and technical training programs to build the human capital necessary to operate and maintain these systems.
Convergent Strategies: Policy, Capital, and Infrastructure
What makes the Elumelu-Masiyiwa dynamic particularly powerful is the complementarity of their approaches. Elumelu operates primarily in the policy and capital mobilization sphere, using his influence to reshape how African governments and investors think about technology infrastructure investment. Masiyiwa operates in the execution sphere, translating vision into fiber optic cables, data centers, and GPU clusters.
Together, they are addressing the three critical bottlenecks that have historically constrained African technology development:
1. Capital Access
Traditional infrastructure financing models—relying heavily on multilateral development banks and foreign direct investment—have proven inadequate for the scale and speed required for AI infrastructure buildout. Elumelu's domestic capital mobilization strategy, combined with Masiyiwa's ability to attract private investment, creates an alternative financing paradigm that reduces dependency while maintaining commercial discipline.
2. Technical Capacity
Infrastructure alone is insufficient without the human capital to develop, deploy, and maintain AI systems. Both leaders have made significant investments in talent development. The Tony Elumelu Foundation has trained over 18,000 African entrepreneurs since 2015, many of whom are now building technology ventures. Cassava Technologies operates skills development programs across its footprint, with a stated goal of training 50,000 AI practitioners by 2027.
3. Policy Frameworks
Perhaps most importantly, both leaders are actively shaping the regulatory environment within which African AI development will occur. Elumelu's engagement with the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) secretariat has pushed digital infrastructure onto the continental integration agenda. Masiyiwa serves on multiple national digital economy advisory boards and has been instrumental in developing data sovereignty frameworks that balance innovation with appropriate governance.
Zimbabwe: A Case Study in Strategic Ambition
Nowhere is the convergence of these forces more evident than in Zimbabwe, where government policy, private infrastructure investment, and strategic partnerships are aligning to create what officials hope will be a regional AI hub.
In late 2024, the Zimbabwean Cabinet approved a National Artificial Intelligence Strategy for the 2026-2030 period, identifying AI as a priority sector for economic diversification. The strategy includes specific provisions for public-private partnerships in infrastructure development, regulatory sandboxes for AI experimentation, and targeted incentives for AI startups.
Simultaneously, President Mnangagwa commissioned AI-powered smart silos for grain storage—a practical demonstration of AI application in agricultural value chains that directly addresses food security challenges while building domestic capacity for AI deployment in critical sectors.
Strive Masiyiwa, himself Zimbabwean, has committed to locating one of Cassava Technologies' five AI factories in Harare, leveraging the country's educated workforce and strategic position in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. The facility will integrate with Liquid Intelligent Technologies' extensive fiber network, which already connects Zimbabwe to undersea cable landing points in both Mozambique and South Africa.
The Zimbabwean example illustrates how policy ambition, indigenous capital deployment, and strategic infrastructure investment can converge to create viable AI ecosystems—even in economies facing significant macroeconomic headwinds.
The Competitive Landscape: Challenges and Critical Success Factors
Despite the compelling vision and significant capital commitments, formidable challenges remain.
Energy Infrastructure
AI factories are extraordinarily energy-intensive. Each of Cassava Technologies' planned facilities will require 20-30 megawatts of reliable power—equivalent to supplying a small city. In many African markets, unreliable grid electricity and high energy costs represent existential threats to data center viability. Masiyiwa has indicated that renewable energy microgrids will be integral to each facility, but energy sovereignty remains a critical dependency.
Talent Competition
Global technology companies are aggressively recruiting African AI talent, offering compensation packages that local ventures struggle to match. Brain drain remains a persistent challenge. While training programs are scaling, retention strategies that allow African technologists to build meaningful careers at home are equally critical.
Market Fragmentation
Africa's 54 national jurisdictions, each with distinct regulatory frameworks, currency regimes, and market dynamics, create complexity that increases infrastructure deployment costs and operational overhead. Continental integration initiatives like AfCFTA offer promise, but regulatory harmonization in digital services remains nascent.
Algorithmic Colonialism Risk
Even with indigenous infrastructure, the risk remains that African AI development becomes overly dependent on foundation models and architectural paradigms developed elsewhere, effectively encoding foreign worldviews and biases into African AI systems. Building truly sovereign AI capabilities requires not just infrastructure but also fundamental research capacity and the development of uniquely African approaches to machine learning and natural language processing.
From Infrastructure to Innovation Ecosystems
The ultimate measure of success will not be gigawatts of computing capacity or kilometers of fiber optic cable, but rather the innovation ecosystems that emerge atop this infrastructure foundation.
Early indicators are promising. African AI startups raised over $400 million in venture capital in 2024, with notable concentrations in financial services (M-Pesa-style mobile money), agriculture (crop disease detection, yield optimization), and healthcare (diagnostic imaging, disease surveillance). As indigenous computing infrastructure scales, the cost of AI experimentation and deployment will decline, potentially triggering a Cambrian explosion of AI-enabled innovation across sectors.
The Elumelu-Masiyiwa infrastructure investments create the conditions for what economists call "increasing returns to scale"—where initial investments reduce costs for subsequent entrants, creating self-reinforcing dynamics that can rapidly shift competitive advantage. If successful, the next generation of globally significant AI companies may emerge not from Palo Alto or Beijing, but from Lagos, Nairobi, or Cape Town.
Policy Implications and Strategic Recommendations
For policymakers, investors, and development practitioners seeking to accelerate Africa's AI transformation, several strategic imperatives emerge from the Elumelu-Masiyiwa model:
1. Prioritize Infrastructure Sovereignty
Cloud computing infrastructure is not merely a technical concern but a strategic economic asset. African governments should treat AI infrastructure with the same sovereignty considerations historically reserved for telecommunications, energy, and transportation.
2. Catalyze Domestic Capital Mobilization
Elumelu's advocacy for deploying African capital toward African infrastructure challenges is sound. Pension funds, sovereign wealth vehicles, and development finance institutions should be given explicit mandates and incentive structures to allocate capital toward digital infrastructure.
3. Invest in Complementary Human Capital
Infrastructure without skilled practitioners is sterile. Parallel investments in technical training, university research capacity, and retention incentives for AI talent are non-negotiable.
4. Harmonize Regulatory Frameworks
The AfCFTA provides a mechanism for regulatory cooperation on digital infrastructure. Priority should be given to harmonizing data sovereignty frameworks, AI ethics standards, and cross-border data flow regulations.
5. Embed AI in Sectoral Development Strategies
Zimbabwe's focus on agricultural AI applications demonstrates the value of embedding AI considerations in sectoral strategies for agriculture, health, education, and manufacturing—rather than treating AI as a standalone technology sector.
Conclusion: Building vs. Borrowing
The Elumelu-Masiyiwa partnership—one mobilizing capital and policy will, the other deploying infrastructure and technical capacity—represents a fundamentally different approach to technological development than has characterized much of Africa's post-independence history.
Rather than waiting for foreign investment or multilateral assistance, these leaders are demonstrating that African capital, African infrastructure, and African innovation capacity can create the conditions for genuine technological sovereignty.
The investments being made today will determine whether 600 million young Africans entering the workforce over the next decade become creators or consumers of AI technologies. Whether African languages, contexts, and challenges are encoded into global AI systems or remain algorithmic afterthoughts. Whether value generated by African data and African intelligence accrues to African economies or is extracted by foreign platforms.
Tony Elumelu and Strive Masiyiwa are betting $4 trillion in capital mobilization and $720 million in infrastructure investment that Africa can build, not just borrow, its digital future. Early evidence suggests they may be right.
The question for the rest of the continent—and the global development community—is whether we will accelerate this transition or continue to default to the aid-dependent, technology-importing paradigm that has constrained African economic emergence for generations.
The AI revolution is underway. Africa can shape it, or be shaped by it. Elumelu and Masiyiwa are ensuring it will be the former.
About the Author
Pamela Y. Johnson is Founder and Principal Advisor at PYJDesigns Advisory Group, where she advises purpose-driven leaders on digital transformation, AI governance, and strategic systems design. Her work spans five African nations through the Digital Empowerment Hubs initiative, training emerging leaders in AI literacy and ethical technology adoption. She holds over 15 years of cross-sector advisory experience across three continents.