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Strive Masiyiwa

Strive Masiyiwa

Cassava Technologies, CEO

In a global AI race defined by, among other things, access to compute, Strive Masiyiwa made a decisive intervention in 2025: he began building Africa’s own.

In early 2025, Cassava Technologies announced plans to invest as much as $720 million in building Africa’s first AI factory in partnership with the world’s leading AI chipmaker, NVIDIA. These “factories,” as coined by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, are facilities equipped with infrastructure, including NVIDIA’s supercomputers powered by graphics processing units (GPUs) needed to deploy AI solutions, from raw data to finished tools.

This infrastructure is crucial. Africa has less than 0.1% of the world’s GPUs. To compete in the global AI market, the continent requires significant investments in compute and other AI infrastructure, and Cassava Technologies’ AI factories are poised to fill this critical gap.

The first of these facilities already opened its doors just outside of Cape Town, South Africa, with 3,000 NVIDIA GPUs. There are plans to open facilities in Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, and Morocco, installing around 12,000 GPUs across the continent.

When fully deployed, these facilities will accelerate research and development across universities, startups, and government agencies in various sectors.

Also in November, under Masiyiwa’s leadership, Cassava launched the Cassava AI Multi-Model Exchange (CAIMEx), which enables African Mobile Network Operators to connect to multiple AI systems through a single interface, eliminating the need for costly infrastructure and complex integrations.

Without significant investments in AI infrastructure, Africa risks getting left behind in the development and advancement of this technology. The continent may still be early in the race, but Strive Masiyiwa’s work in 2025 is ensuring that we run with equipment.

How We Selected

Building anything of value is hard anywhere in the world. In Africa, it is harder. The Builders’ List recognises people doing it anyway.

Beyond shipping products, Africa’s technology ecosystem constantly navigates unreliable power, fragmented logistics, weak public infrastructure, and regulatory uncertainty—often all at once. Progress is rarely linear, and success is usually hard-won.

Founders alone do not make the industry. It is sustained by people doing a variety of work, some of it invisible but critical to the industry’s success. To recognise them, TechCabal is launching The Builders’ List: an annual index of the most consequential people shaping Africa’s technology ecosystem in the calendar year. It is a record of who’s building, and what their work reveals about the system they are building within.

For the inaugural edition, our selected Builders are grouped across five categories:

Operators: Those who make systems work at scale.
Innovators: Those creating new products, models, or technical possibilities.
Enablers: The individuals and institutions lowering the cost of building for others.
Organisers: Those connecting people, capital, and opportunity.
Keepers: The stewards of trust, continuity, and institutional memory.

Together, these roles offer a more complete map of how the ecosystem functions.

The Builders’ List is an editorial project led by the TechCabal newsroom, informed by independent reporting and conversations with founders, operators, investors, policymakers, and long-time ecosystem observers across the continent and the diaspora.

Our selections were based on our assessment of what materially changed within the calendar year, from infrastructure to policy or scale, rather than reputation or momentum alone. Where work is still emerging, progress was evaluated within the realities of the sector, market, and country in which it occurred.

Candidates were assessed comparatively and contextually. Starting from over 600 deeply researched names spanning all 54 African countries, we weighed outcomes against each builder’s operating environment—geography, regulation, capital access, impact and institutional maturity. Context that applies in Lagos doesn’t automatically translate to Kigali or Dakar.

Final decisions were made through editorial review. While external perspectives informed our reporting, the list reflects TechCabal’s independent editorial judgment.

This process, as our first, has been a critical learning curve. It reminded us that Africa’s technology ecosystem is far broader than funding headlines suggest—spanning hardware engineers in Cairo, beekeepers in rural Kenya, ministers rewiring infrastructure, and documentarians building institutional memory.

We learned that in 2025, the builders who matter most are no longer defined by capital raised or growth velocity, but by what they’ve made durable. This list revealed an ecosystem maturing past obsessions with scale and spectacle, toward the quieter work of building things that last—profitable businesses, regulatory frameworks, talent pipelines, and infrastructure others can build on.

The Builders’ List will return in 2026, and the patterns will shift. But the commitment remains: to document not just who is building, but what their work reveals about the system taking shape.

Africa’s technology ecosystem is firmly in its endurance era

Temitayo Jaiyeola, Senior Reporter and Lead Curator, The Builders’ List