Jensen Huang’s exit puts Nvidia’s African AI bet to the test

Three weeks before he resigned as Nvidia chief executive, Jensen Huang singled out Egypt and other African markets in an interview about where US technology companies should compete.

“There’s a reason why we’re in Africa,” he told Yahoo Finance at Nvidia’s conference in Berlin. “We want to compete everywhere.”

Huang resigned after Nvidia’s board met on Wednesday to consider removing him following reports of two extramarital affairs. One involved a Chinese businesswoman whom US authorities suspected of working for Beijing’s intelligence services, an allegation China denied. The other involved a senior Nvidia executive who reported to Huang, according to the New York Times.

Huang’s departure on Thursday comes as Nvidia’s most prominent African partner, the Zimbabwean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa’s Cassava Technologies, is trying to turn a GPU cluster in Cape Town into a business spanning five countries. The US chipmaker supplies the processors and owns a stake in Cassava, giving it a financial interest in whether African companies will pay for computing power closer to home.

Cassava is the first test

Nvidia became both a supplier to and a shareholder in Cassava Technologies, the artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure group founded by Zimbabwean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa. Cassava disclosed the equity investment in October 2025 without disclosing the size.

Its rollout could cost up to $720 million and plans to deploy 12,000 Nvidia GPUs. Its first data centre is running in Cape Town. Cassava and Vodafone have announced a project in Egypt, while Kenya, Nigeria and Morocco remain part of the expansion plan.

The Nvidia investment in Cassava matters because it would give African companies a way to rent the computing power needed to train and run AI models on the continent. South Africa already offers an example beyond the planned Cassava centres.

South Africa’s Altron said its Nvidia-powered facility went live in October 2025 with five customers, including Lelapa AI, which develops speech tools for languages such as isiZulu and Sesotho.

A consortium that includes Nvidia and South Korea’s Naver also plans a data centre near Casablanca with up to 500 megawatts of capacity, aimed in part at serving European customers.

What changes for Africa

It’s still early to predict what Huang’s exit will have on the deal with Cassava. The question is whether Nvidia’s next leadership continues to take equity stakes in regional operators and gives them timely access to newer chips.

If Nvidia becomes more selective, African operators could must rely more heavily on outside financing or secure large customers before expanding.

Local data centres give African customers more control over where their data is processed. But the development of compute power still depends on hardware and software supplied by US companies, such as Nvidia.

Nvidia decides future chip supply and investment, while African operators have to make the economics work through local demand, power costs and pricing. Huang’s departure could affect such development if the leadership changes its approach to the continent.