The World Bank wants to rent GPUs to African governments, and names Cassava and Nvidia as partners

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The World Bank wants to rent GPUs to African governments, and names Cassava and Nvidia as partners

The World Bank Group launched its first digital strategy in Seoul on Tuesday and, with it, an AI Infrastructure and Readiness Initiative to help governments in emerging markets get affordable computing power. The idea is shared, pay-as-you-go access to GPUs, the chips AI runs on, instead of each country building its own national data centre, which the Bank calls costly and slow. Africa and Latin America come first. Cassava Technologies and Nvidia are named as "knowledge partners", but neither the press release nor TechTrends says what that involves, whether either supplies hardware or money, how much the initiative is worth, which countries or sites are included, when it starts, or what access will cost. Kenya is not named. The closest Kenyan link is Cassava's own plan: it said in November 2025 that it had bought 12,000 Nvidia GPUs, a figure it has not independently shown, and its "AI Factory" began running in South Africa this year with Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and Morocco next. The wider strategy rests on four priorities, connectivity, cheaper smartphones and data, digital ID and payments and skills, and readiness for AI, with an emphasis on "small AI": task-specific tools such as spotting crop disease or helping a shop manage stock. World Bank President Ajay Banga called that "AI for the people". The numbers behind it are the Bank's: more than 2 billion people were offline in 2025, 23% of people in low-income countries use the internet against 94% in rich ones, and developing economies are expected to create about 420 million jobs while 1.2 billion young people reach working age over the next 10 to 15 years.

Sources: World Bank · TechTrends