Technology

Africa Tech Festival 2025 opened in Cape Town.

Africa Tech Festival 2025 opened in Cape Town – 1 200 start-ups, 120 investors. New reports show data-centre capacity doubling every 18 months as AI demand explodes; MTN & Vodacom unveil “edge-cloud” nodes in 8 cities to cut latency below 20 ms for enterprise AI workloads.

The hum of servers and the murmur of deal-making have become the new soundtrack of Cape Town’s international convention centre. For a week each October, the city turns into Africa’s largest tech bazaar, a place where coders in hoodies queue for espresso beside ministers in tailored suits. This year the numbers feel different: badge-scanners recorded 12 000 footsteps before the opening keynote had even ended, and the queue for coffee snaked past a LED wall that pulsed with real-time investment tallies. By the time the mayor cut the ceremonial fibre-optic cable, the tote board already showed US340 million in soft commitments. Nobody applauded; they were too busy refreshing their phones.

The official brochure calls it the Africa Tech Festival. Attendees simply say “I’m going to Cape Town,” the way financiers once said “I’m going to Davos.” The 2025 edition opened with a blunt message from the organiser: the continent’s digital traffic is doubling faster than the cables and cooling plants can keep up. A slide deck that flashed behind the stage claimed data-centre capacity is now growing at 64 % every eighteen months—twice the global average. The stat drew a collective intake of breath, partly because the source was an audit firm not given to hyperbole, and partly because everyone in the hall knows what drives the curve: artificial intelligence models that chew through terabytes before breakfast.

Two companies that rarely share a stage—MTN and Vodacom—used the opening morning to unveil identical-sounding but rivalrous projects. Each has planted what they call “edge-cloud” nodes in eight cities: Lagos, Accra, Nairobi, Kigali, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Luanda and Dar es Salaam. The nodes are essentially micro-data-centres squeezed into 40-foot shipping containers, painted matte black and cooled by liquid immersion systems that glow an unsettling neon blue through plexiglass panels. Inside are GPU racks dense enough to train a large-language model yet small enough to slide onto a freight elevator. The sales pitch is latency: by keeping compute within 120 kilometres of end-users, round-trip response times drop below twenty milliseconds, the threshold at which enterprise applications stop feeling like they are waiting for permission.

During a closed-door briefing, an MTN network engineer sketched the physics on a whiteboard. Every millisecond saved, he said, translates into roughly three additional algorithmic trades per second for a financial-services client, or eight extra personalised recommendations for an e-commerce platform. The maths sounded rehearsed, but the margins are real enough that both operators have pre-leased 60 % of the new capacity before the cooling fluid has settled. Banks want the nodes for fraud-detection models that must decide in sub-seconds whether a card swipe in Sandton is genuine. Health-tech start-ups need them to run imaging diagnostics inside rural clinics whose nearest fibre link is fifty kilometres away. One Ghanaian agritech firm plans to push drone imagery through the Accra node each dawn, generating daily moisture maps for two million cocoa farmers before the sun is high enough to evaporate the evidence.

The festival floor is arranged like a ring road. Inside the circle are the start-ups—1 200 this year, selected from 4 300 applicants. Each booth is identical: two bar stools, one monitor, a QR code that downloads a pitch deck. The uniformity is deliberate; the real differentiation happens on the lanyards, where colour-coding signals funding stage. Red tags denote pre-seed, orange Series A, green Series B or later. Investors wear black lanyards and move with the slow confidence of shoppers who know everything is for sale if the price is right. A Nairobi-based venture partner admitted, off the record, that his firm booked flights before the application window closed. “We are not here to judge slides,” he said. “We are here to see who already has a letter of intent from a telco.”

Outside the ring, the incumbent giants occupy carpeted pavilions. Huawei’s stand features a live demo of a 5G base station powered entirely by solar micro-grids; Ericsson counters with a holographic call routed via low-Earth-orbit satellites. Between them, a South African start-up called AerialCore projects real-time thermal video of elephant herds onto a gauze screen, the feed processed in a node fifty metres away. The latency clock in the corner reads 14 ms. A ranger watching the same feed in Kruger could—hypothetically—dispatch a drone to intercept poachers before the elephants even flap an ear.

Yet the most telling conversations happen upstairs, in glass-walled conference rooms where the air conditioning hums louder than the keynote speakers. Here, chief financial officers from the two telecoms meet pension-fund managers who control domestic savings pools. The topic is debt, not equity. Building a conventional data centre costs roughly US8 million per megawatt; these edge nodes land at US4 million because the real estate is leased and the cooling system is sealed. Still, rolling out eight cities means finding US200 million without blinking. MTN has securitised part of its tower portfolio; Vodacom has issued green bonds earmarked for energy-efficient infrastructure. Both are betting that the same enterprises demanding low latency will sign five-year contracts with built-in price escalators. The pitch is seductive: why ship your data to Dublin or Mumbai when the cloud can live next door?

A research director from a London-based firm quietly disputes the hype. He points to the power grid—still prone to load-shedding in South Africa, still reliant on diesel generators in Lagos. “Latency is meaningless if the lights go out,” he mutters. Yet even he concedes that the nodes are designed to sip electricity: each container draws 250 kilowatts, roughly what a big-box supermarket consumes, and can ride on lithium-ion storage for six hours if the grid collapses. The bigger risk, he argues, is economic: Africa’s AI boom could follow the same path as its mobile-money explosion—immensely valuable to consumers, but margin-crushing for carriers trapped between price-sensitive users and dollar-denominated capex.

On the third day the festival moves to the waterfront. A cruise ship—chartered, rebranded and fitted with satellite dishes—becomes a floating demo lab. Guests sip Rooibos gin while laptops stream 8-video-conference calls routed exclusively through the new edge nodes. Somewhere between Robben Island and the Atlantic swell, the latency meter drops to 12 ms. A cheer goes up; selfies are taken. The moment feels staged, but it also feels like evidence.

Back on shore, a junior minister from Rwanda summarises the mood in a single sentence: “We are no longer waiting for the cloud to come to us.” Whether that cloud generates profits, or simply generates more data centres shimmering silently on city outskirts, is the experiment Africa has now decided to run—in public, in real time, with the world watching and the cooling fluid already glowing blue.

This has been The Red Hot Report from Pepper-Room. The news that bears it all.

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