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By Ross Moyo
US artificial intelligence giant Anthropic has announced that it has selected Cassava Technologies as its reseller for the African market, bringing one of the most important companies in the AI era to Africa for the first time.Cassava thus strengthens its African AI position with key Anthropic tie-up.
The landmark agreement, announced this week, gives African enterprises direct access to Claude, Anthropic’s flagship family of large language models, through Cassava Technologies on Amazon’s Bedrock platform.
Anthropic, which is expected to go public through an initial public offering that could value it at more than US$2 trillion, specialises in AI solutions for large businesses, such as banks and mobile operators, as well as governments. The company is widely regarded as the Rolls-Royce of AI, favoured by organisations that place a high premium on safety, reliability and data protection.
Some of its AI products are so advanced that the US government has restricted their use outside the United States under export control rules for frontier AI systems, making this authorised channel into Africa even more significant.
“What matters to our customers is being able to use AI in their business, and that starts with access to the best models,” said Mr Hardy Pemhiwa, President and Group CEO of Cassava Technologies.
Bringing Anthropic’s Claude to them through Amazon Bedrock delivers on this need, which is supported by the infrastructure, partnerships and services African businesses need to adopt them responsibly and take a greater part in the digital economy, he said.
Cassava Technologies will offer the services alongside another US technology giant, Amazon, through Amazon’s Bedrock platform. Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service from Amazon Web Services that allows organisations to access leading foundation models via a single API without having to manage infrastructure or train their own models.
The significance for Africa is threefold. First, access. Second, infrastructure. Third, trust.
Until now, African banks, telecoms and governments who wanted to use Claude faced complex offshore contracting, dollar billing challenges and data residency concerns. Through Cassava, they now have a continent-wide partner that can provide local contracts, local billing, local support and local data centre proximity.
Cassava is uniquely positioned across Africa, with a distribution presence spanning more than 40 countries. The company, which was founded by tech billionaire Strive Masiyiwa, is the only operator in Africa of NVIDIA AI data centres, known as AI factories. These produce tokens that AI chatbots consume as they process information to generate intelligent responses.
These AI factories are critical. While many talk about AI, Cassava actually manufactures the computational power that AI runs on. An AI factory is essentially a super-cluster of NVIDIA GPUs, high-speed networking and storage designed to run and serve large language models at scale. Cassava’s AI factories, housed within Africa Data Centres, mean that inference and token generation can happen on African soil, reducing latency and addressing data sovereignty.
Unlike mobile operators, which serve consumers directly, Cassava Technologies is a dedicated technology company whose customers are large businesses, including mobile operators. Multinationals operating in Africa also rely on the company to support their complex technology solutions.
That distinction matters. Econet, MTN, Vodacom and Orange are consumers of Cassava’s fibre, data centres and cloud. Now, they can become consumers of its AI models too.
Industry analysts say the deal positions Cassava at the top of the AI value chain in Africa. According to IDC, enterprise AI spending in Africa and the Middle East will quadruple from 3.2 billion US dollars in 2024 to over 12 billion US dollars by 2028. McKinsey estimates generative AI could add 2.9 trillion US dollars to Africa’s economy by 2030 if adoption barriers are removed.
By securing Anthropic, Cassava has secured the premium end of the market — the banks that cannot afford hallucinations, the governments that cannot risk data leaks, the telecoms that need to process millions of customer interactions safely.
Anthropic’s Claude is known for its constitutional AI approach, which trains models to be helpful, harmless and honest, with enterprise-grade safety controls that have made it the model of choice for regulated industries in the US and Europe.
For Zimbabwe, the implications are direct. Liquid Intelligent Technologies Zimbabwe, Africa Data Centres Zimbabwe and Liquid C2 can now bring Claude to local banks, insurance companies, universities and government departments without requiring offshore entities.
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