The move marks a significant boost to the company’s efforts to establish advanced computing infrastructure across Africa.

The investment arrives alongside Cassava’s previously disclosed plan—signed earlier this year—to partner with NVIDIA by deploying its graphics processing units (GPUs) and software tools into African data-centres.

Under that arrangement, Cassava will incorporate NVIDIA hardware and services at its facilities, enabling enterprises, governments, and researchers to train AI models locally and retain sensitive data within the continent.

Hardy Pemhiwa, President & Group CEO of Cassava Technologies, described the deal as a “milestone” that the company expects to unlock further value and catalyze expansion of digital infrastructure and services—ultimately to help bridge Africa’s digital divide.

Cassava’s investor base is wide and diverse, including names such as Econet Group, British International Investment, Finnfund, Google LLC, International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Public Investment Corporation of South Africa and Royal Bafokeng Holdings.

NVIDIA now joins that list of backers. Cassava operates globally—with a significant presence across Africa, the Middle East and Latin America—and manages a portfolio of companies including Liquid Intelligent Technologies (fibre networks and connectivity), Africa Data Centres (colocation and critical facilities), Liquid C2 (cloud and cybersecurity), Cassava.ai (AI-enabled services) and Sasai Fintech (digital financial services).

One of the big strategic rationales for the NVIDIA deal is to address what has been described as Africa’s compute gap: many local organisations currently lack access to the high-performance GPU infrastructure necessary to train complex AI models.

Cassava and NVIDIA plan to build what have been termed “AI factories” in several African countries—including Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa and Morocco—to deploy tens of thousands of GPUs in the coming years.

Overall, this partnership underscores a shift in how major technology investment is flowing into Africa’s digital economy: rather than simply extending legacy infrastructure, this deal reflects a private-sector-driven build-out of frontier computing and AI capabilities on the continent.

According to analysts, it could help reposition African enterprises, researchers and governments to be more self-sufficient in AI training and data processing, while also reducing latency, data-sovereignty issues, and reliance on off-continent compute.

Cassava’s alliance with NVIDIA is more than just funding: it signals a concerted effort to elevate Africa’s digital infrastructure into the era of artificial intelligence and advanced cloud services.