Stanlib places bet on African AI

The massive infrastructure investment required to instal Nvidia GPUs that will power Al factories in Africa needs institutional money. Enter money raised from South African pension funds.

- By Lindsey Schutters

When Africa’s leading tech billionaire, Strive Masiyiwa, announced last week that Cassava Technologies would be installing 12,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) to power AI factories on African soil, the immediate question was: who's paying for this?

Stanlib Infrastructure Investments announced a strategic investment in Africa Data Centres (ADC), a subsidiary of Cassava Technologies, on 30 October. The amount remains undisclosed but the mandate is clear: the capital goes exclusively towards expanding ADC's data centre capacity in South Africa, specifically in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

This isn’t foreign venture capital or development finance institution money looking for impact metrics. No, this is South African pension fund capital, the kind that’s supposed to generate stable, long-dated returns for retirees. And it’s being deployed into the physical infrastructure needed to house Masiyiwa’s AI factory vision.

Andy Louw, co-head at Stanlib Infrastructure Investments, was explicit about the source of funds in the press conference after the announcement: “Stanlib Infrastructure Investments is a private equity fund housed within Stanlib Asset Management.

“We raise money from South African pension funds and institutions and deploy that money into new or existing infrastructure assets in South Africa. So, we are an equity infrastructure fund from South African invention fund money.”