To Grow Africa’s AI Economy, Microsoft Invests $300 Million In Datacenters

Microsoft will invest $290 million over the next two years in South Africa on AI and cloud infrastructure, vice chair and president Brad Smith announced.

At an event with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in Johannesburg Thursday, Smith said the investment will help the country’s “ambition to become a globally competitive AI economy.”

It has built massive datacenters in the past three years in Johannesburg and Cape Town, a $1.1 billion investment.

Microsoft is also paying for the certification process for 50,000 young South Africans so they can get qualifications for their digital skills studies.

Smith says this is part of the plan to provide education to Africa’s youngsters, then provide them with certification of having learned those skills to “help” them get a job.

The “high-demand” skills include AI, data science, cybersecurity analysis and cloud solution architecture. This is “even more important,” he stresses. “These are precisely the certificates and skills that win people jobs.”

“We're in effect paying for people so they can get the training and take the certification exams,” Smith told me. With a “Microsoft certificate for something like cloud architecture or cyber security or AI, you're going to be able to get a job.”

With its endemic poverty, paying for education is a problem for millions of youngsters. “But not everybody can afford to even take the exam to get that certificate,” says Smith.

In January, Microsoft announced it would train on millions Africans in digital skills this year, a continuation of its digital skills program it has been running for several years.

This will help Africa “become the next global economic powerhouse,” Lillian Barnard, president for Microsoft Africa, said at the time.

Much of this training is done by South Africa’s Youth Employment Service (YES), which “takes talented youth from disadvantaged backgrounds and puts them in their first job,” its CEO Ravi Naidoo tells me.

This private-public partnership with SA’s government has 1,800 corporate partners and has trained 177,000 people so far and is adding about 35,000 every year.

“We want to make sure that talented African youth are confident and competent in the use of AI,” he says. “Both because that will help them adapt to changing sectors and jobs and also enable countries from Africa to be more effective in terms of their using AI in the future.”

Smith is enthusiastic about the skills training, having visited the office of YES, which trains and helps place youngsters.

“YES is a great organisation that is literally helping 37,000 people a year,” he says.

“We are equipping 50,000 people here in South Africa with that [education] opportunity in the next year. In a sense, infrastructure and skilling go together. They're the two foundational layers, if you will, that an AI economy is built upon,” he told me.

“And I think hopefully what we're doing here today is going to help the whole AI sector, the digital technology sector in South Africa continue to grow at even a faster pace.”

Thanking Microsoft for these investments, Ramaphosa called it “an American company with an African heart”.