President Ntuli
It’s an eye-opening comparison. While hypothetically a startup in a G7 economy can refine its AI models every 30 minutes during training, that same iteration might take six days in Africa. This isn’t just a delay; it’s a digital divide that can stifle innovation. The Global Innovation Index 2025 ranks sub-Saharan Africa as home to the world’s largest share of “innovation overperformers,” with countries like South Africa, Rwanda, and Senegal defying expectations. Yet, inequitable access to computing power is holding back this momentum. Africa’s talent is ready, its ideas are bold, but without the infrastructure to power progress, the continent risks losing out on this potential.
Contextualising the compute divide
High-performance computing (HPC) has become the backbone of scientific and technological progress worldwide. Yet in Africa, its adoption remains limited. Inadequate infrastructure, high maintenance costs, and a shortage of skilled personnel have created formidable barriers. While countries across the world accelerate toward HPC-driven innovation, Africa is left with only a handful of supercomputers—the most powerful type of high-performance computer—to serve 55 countries. The continent’s most powerful system is the only one currently named on the Top 500 list of the leading supercomputers in the world—it’s on place 383. This one supercomputer cannot meet the demands of a region brimming with talent and ambition.
HPC relies on data centre infrastructure, which is the digital foundation that enables compute-intensive workloads. And here, Africa faces another daunting gap. Despite investment in data centres growing 13% faster than the global average, Africa accounts for only 1% of global data centre capacity, despite housing 18% of the world’s population.
This shortfall translates into clustered, and often siloed, server resources, high workstation costs, and limited HPC services. An analysis of Zindi’s 11,000-strong AI talent network revealed that only 5% have access to computational power for research and innovation. Meanwhile, the global computer market is expanding at 9% annually, with over 50% of the world’s top supercomputers concentrated in just three countries – the United States, Japan and Germany. In a comparison between continents, Africa is at the bottom of the list, with only one supercomputer and just 0.2% of the system share. This is more than a technological lag. It’s a structural challenge that risks sidelining the continent from the next wave of global innovation.
A critical platform for economic prosperity
Africa’s shortage of HPC resources is both a scientific and economic disadvantage. HPC is the engine behind modern innovation, enabling advanced data analysis, faster product development, and AI technologies that drive growth across sectors like healthcare, manufacturing, and finance.
For Africa, the potential impact is transformative. HPC can accelerate drug discovery for diseases affecting the continent, enable precision agriculture to strengthen food security, and support breakthroughs in energy and climate modeling. It also fosters collaborative research and builds technical capacity, positioning African scientists to contribute meaningfully to global innovation.
Without access, these opportunities remain out of reach. As global investment in AI and advanced computing surges, the risk is clear: compute divides will deepen, widening gaps in competitiveness and productivity. Africa must prioritise sovereign innovation, developing its own technological capabilities, if it is to keep pace with the next wave of progress.
Charting the path forward
Building supercomputing systems is no small feat—they take one to two years to design, deploy, and become fully operational. That’s why time is of the essence. To close the compute gap, Africa must prioritise strategic partnerships with technology leaders, accelerate investment in digital infrastructure, and create policies that enable seamless and secure data mobility. This means optimising existing resources, expanding capacity, and ensuring that users have access to the skills and training needed to harness advanced technologies.
Progress has begun
Encouragingly, momentum is building as government agencies collaborate with technology partners to drive progress. One public sector organisation in South Africa for example is working to deploy a new high-performance computing system designed to provide shared access for universities, research institutions, and private enterprises. Such initiatives aim to democratise compute power and fuel innovation across sectors, from scientific research to industrial applications. Similarly, we see efforts in agriculture, where computing technology is set to improve farming productivity.
Beyond these projects, HPE is supporting local companies as they develop essential AI infrastructure and make critical resources like GPUs more accessible—steps that will start enabling Africa to participate more proactively in the global data economy and strengthen its capacity for local and regional innovation.
The global race for supercomputing is not just about technology, it’s about shaping the future of scientific discovery, innovation, and economic growth. For Africa, advancing in this space is critical to unlocking solutions for its most pressing challenges, from healthcare and food security to climate resilience and industrial competitiveness. HPC is the foundation on which breakthroughs are built, and without it, the continent risks being a spectator in a world driven by data, compute and AI.
Yes, the gap is wide, but progress is real. Strategic partnerships and bold infrastructure investments are already laying the groundwork for change. These efforts can and must be scaled to ensure that Africa’s extraordinary talent and creativity are matched with the tools to thrive. The time to accelerate is now, because Africa’s innovation story deserves to be written not on the sidelines, but at its rightful place on the global stage.
President Ntuli, Managing Director of HPE South Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
