AWS reaffirms its commitment to cloud and AI development in Africa

AWS has reinforced its commitment to expand its cloud and AI services in Africa. At the AWS Summit, 2024 held in Johannesburg, South Africa, the tech giant revealed it has already invested billions of shillings in the region with a commitment to invest a further $1.7 billion by the end of 2029 in building infrastructure to meet the demands of its customers. 

‘’The AWS community in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is thriving,  we have thousands of AWS customers in SSA today, and we see  this as an incredibly strategic area of growth for us.’’ Chris Erasmus, Country General Manager, South Africa, AWS  said.

‘’We have over 6000 partners that are helping us to build and deliver our business value’’ Chris added.

Chris said the Cape Town region alone has over 160 AWS access services and the company will continue to grow.

AWS also revealed that it’s celebrating 20 years of being on the continent this year sharing some of the milestones it has achieved. Starting with South Africa, in 2019 for example AWS says it set an ambitious goal of powering 100% of its infrastructure through renewable energy. According to Chrish, AWS has achieved that goal 7 years ahead of schedule and in South Africa alone, it has launched a solar plant located in Northern Cape Province. 

The plant generates up to 28,000 megawatt-hours (MWh) of renewable energy per year, which equals the annual electricity consumption of over 8,000 average South African homes.

At the summit, the company also announced its ambitious plans to promote the adoption of AI in the region. The company showcased some of its Generative AI (GenAI) capabilities using Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies available through a single application programming interface (API). 

David Brown, Vice President, of AWS Compute and Networking Services during his keynote said AWS is at the forefront of generative AI, making it accessible and easy to use.

‘’Generative AI gives us a whole new software component, the ability to reason and it stands to completely revolutionize how we approach some of the world’s largest challenges across nearly every industry’’ 

‘’AT AWS, we’re breaking through technology barriers and making generative AI accessible and easy to use’’ he said.

He said the company will continue to expand its operations throughout African and South African regions,

At the summit, AWS also showcased customer success stories, including Goldfields, JSE, and Adobe, highlighting the transformative power of AWS cloud and AI technologies.

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