Fastest cloud AI chips and zones are outside Africa, adding costs for African businesses
The biggest AI accelerators and specialised cloud AI zones are concentrated in Europe, the US and Asia, forcing many African firms to run workloads abroad and pay higher latency, transit and...
The fastest AI chips that cloud providers rent out are offered in Europe, the United States and Asia. African businesses and researchers who want them must send their data abroad, which adds delay, transit costs and legal work.
Google's own list of Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) regions shows no TPU zones in Africa, although Google runs dozens of regions worldwide, one of them in Johannesburg. A South African company can rent ordinary Google servers there, but for TPUs it has to go overseas. Its documentation says the largest TPU configurations are available in only a few regions and zones, all of them outside the continent.
Microsoft Azure has two South African regions, South Africa North and South Africa West, and Amazon Web Services has a region in Cape Town. The largest GPU fleets of both, used to train and run the heaviest AI models, sit mostly in Europe, North America and Asia.
The continent's data-centre base is small. Industry research counted about 229 operational data centres in Africa in 2024, with capacity near 300MW, under 1% of the world's. Around 40% of those sites are in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. The market was worth roughly US$3.49 billion in 2024 and is growing.
Local operators carry part of the load. Teraco, now owned by Digital Realty, runs a 110MW campus in Isando, Johannesburg, and more than 200MW across its sites, and connects customers directly to cloud providers so their traffic stays off the public internet.
Cloud providers usually give three reasons for slower rollouts: where demand is concentrated, the power and cooling the hardware needs, and regulation. Demand and local data-centre capacity in Africa are both rising.
Until the hardware arrives, the cost falls on African firms. Running work in distant regions means longer round trips, transit charges and the paperwork of cross-border data rules. In South Africa, the Protection of Personal Information Act sets conditions and safeguards for sending personal information abroad, and a business using a foreign cloud region must meet them first. Services that need fast live responses, and anything built on regulated data, are the most constrained.
Newzroom dot Africa has reached out to Google and Teraco for comment and is awaiting a response. This story will be updated when they respond.
