Stratos Lab is deploying over 50 Nvidia AI servers from Gigabyte, comprising over 400 GPUs, at a data centre in Centurion.
Stratos Lab, Ecoblox, and Digital Parks Africa (DPA) announced a project to install the most powerful AI cloud on the continent at DPA’s data centre in Centurion.
“The programme target is $50 million (R797.61 million) over the first two years,” Stratos CEO Chris Mostert told MyBroadband.
“That will fund the 50+ NVIDIA B300 HGX servers from Gigabyte — 400+ GPUs, 7.2 EFLOPS — plus the high-density infrastructure at DPA.”
EFLOPS is an abbreviation for exaflops, or quintillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS), a measure of how fast a machine can process calculations containing decimal numbers.
Stratos Lab is a South African neocloud provider, Ecoblox is an AI systems integrator, and Digital Parks Africa is a local open-access, carrier-neutral data centre provider.
Ecoblox is the systems integration and infrastructure partner, handling cluster design, procurement, installation, optimisation through to handover, at which point operations pass to Stratos Lab.
“This groundbreaking collaboration establishes a new benchmark for AI Clouds in Africa, de-risking infrastructure investments,” the companies said.
“It also positions South Africa as the continent’s primary hub for Sovereign AI compute.”
They said the partnership directly addresses Africa’s most critical AI scaling bottlenecks, including power density, high-density cooling, and extended hardware lead times.
While the investment will deliver lower latency across the African continent, Mostert said AI training was not latency-sensitive.
“That’s why South Africa. With our undersea-cable connectivity, a cluster here can serve Europe, the Middle East and India without the cost, power constraints and lead times of building in Europe.”
So while lower latency was an obvious benefit, the real advantage was reduced operational costs for Africa and the global market.
“Ultra-dense AI workloads demand an unyielding physical foundation, specialised power management, and pristine environmental controls,” said Menno Parsons, CEO, Digital Parks Africa.
“Digital Parks Africa is proud to provide the data centre facility required to sustain these Nvidia B300 clusters, ensuring local data remains secure, accessible, and truly sovereign.”
Menno Parsons speaking to visitors at the launch of the Master Power Technologies (MPT) customer experience centre in Midrand. MPT is a sister company of Digital Parks Africa.
Asked for details about the project’s funding, Mostert explained that the investment came from Dubai-based family offices.
“These families spent the past decade running large-scale hydro-powered crypto mining and are now moving into GPU-as-a-service,” he said.
“They’re not passive capital — Stratos Lab’s investors also have operations in Dubai and Istanbul, including data centres, so they came to this already understanding power, density and utilisation economics.”
He emphasised that the investors were entirely separate from Ecoblox, which is also a Dubai-based entity.
Mostert said the shift from mining to GPU rental was less of a leap than it sounded. It’s a different workload, but the same operating discipline.
The deployment was contracted in phases, with the first tranche of 25 servers signed at $10.42 million (R166.41 million), with the balance following as the build-out progresses.
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