Kenya’s top telco, Safaricom, is doubling down on artificial intelligence with a half-billion-dollar infrastructure push across East Africa, signaling a strategic pivot from connectivity to computational power.
Over the next three years, the telco will deploy AI-ready data centres, cloud platforms, and developer ecosystems designed to serve both enterprises and startups.
“Africa has an opportunity to define its own AI destiny. While global AI development has largely been concentrated in the West and parts of Asia, and Africa must now move beyond being a passive consumer of AI technologies,” said Cynthia Kropac, Safaricom’s Chief Enterprise Business Officer, during a keynote at the Connected Africa Summit that is running in Diani.
Safaricom claims it has already upskilled 5,000 staff in AI fundamentals, a tacit admission that infrastructure alone won’t cut it. Whether startups and corporates will take advantage of the platforms to solve homegrown challenges, from Swahili-language NLP for small traders to AI-driven soil analysis for smallholder farmers, will be a real test for the investment.
Critics question if the investment can avoid becoming another siloed telco project. Kropac insisted that partnerships with universities and regulators would force the ecosystem open.
With Africa’s digital economy projected to hit $712 billion by 2050, the continent’s AI infrastructure gap risks leaving it as a perpetual tenant in others’ digital empires.
