South Africa invests $27M in AI, blockchain research infrastructure
South Africa joins global AI leaders with major tech investment
South Africa has invested 484 million rand (over $27 million) into research in artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and other emerging technologies, according to Blade Nzimande, the country’s Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation. The investment is aimed at developing foundational digital capabilities in the public sector.
Nzimande said his department developed a 10-year plan to implement the 2019 White Paper on Science, Technology, and Innovation, which outlines five core research areas:
- AI, cybernetics, and robotics
- Mixed reality and digital twins
- Internet of Things, network technologies, and cloud computing
- Cybersecurity and blockchain
- Modeling and simulation
These areas are supported by the Fundamental Digital Capabilities Research (FDCR) platform and its Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR), a network of 12 research groups at 9 South African universities, including the Universities of Pretoria, Stellenbosch, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Western Cape, Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal, North-West, and Sol Plaatje.
CAIR focuses on:
- Adaptive and cognitive systems
- AI and cybersecurity
- AI for development
- Machine learning applications
- Computational logic
- AI ethics
- Fundamentals of machine learning
- Knowledge representation and reasoning
- Probabilistic modeling
Recent groups established include Swarm Intelligence at Sol Plaatje University and Speech Technologies at the University of Limpopo.
Over the past four years, the department has invested more than R484 million into the FDCR project, with R98.5 million allocated for the 2025/26 fiscal year.
Additionally, South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has been conducting its own AI research, focusing on generative and probabilistic machine learning, computer vision, AI language models, and natural language processing.
South Africa among global leaders in AI infrastructure
According to MyBroadband, South Africa hosts four data centers dedicated to AI processing—making it the only African nation with such infrastructure. This puts it alongside 13 global leaders in AI compute capacity, as highlighted in a study from Oxford University titled “AI Compute Sovereignty: Governing Infrastructure Across Territories, Cloud Providers, and Accelerators.”
The study categorizes AI data centers into two types: training-focused and inference-focused. South Africa has two of each, placing it in the same tier as countries like Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Italy.
The U.S. and China lead the world with 26 and 22 AI data centers, followed by Germany (7), Singapore (6), and India, the UK, and France (each with 5). South Africa’s four centers firmly position it in the second tier of global AI infrastructure leadership. South Korea, Japan, Italy and Australia have the same number.
As we wrote, South African Post Office gets R1.8 billion, not promised R3.8 billion
