By Ijeoma Olorunfemi
A Nigerian technology company, Udu Technologies, has inaugurated a Graphics Processing Units (GPU) cloud platform aimed at enhancing Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications.
The platform is providing developers, businesses and governments across Africa with more affordable access to computing infrastructure.
The platform, known as Africa GPU Hub (AGHCloud.ai), provides on-demand access to Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), specialised processors used for training and running AI models and other computationally intensive workloads.
Mr Alexander Tsado, Chief Executive Officer of Udu Technologies, in a statement issued on Tuesday in Abuja, said the platform would provide GPU computing at less than one dollar per hour.
Tsado said the platform came with commonly used AI development tools, including PyTorch, TensorFlow, vLLM and LoRA, pre-configured to enable users to develop, train and deploy AI applications without having to build their own GPU infrastructure.
He said the platform was designed to reduce the financial and technical barriers limiting access to high-performance computing in Africa.
According to him, the platform enables users to access computing resources within hours, rather than spending months setting up and managing dedicated GPU infrastructure.
He said the company had deployed NVIDIA H100 and Blackwell Pro 6000 GPU clusters in Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, South Africa, Togo and Zambia.
Tsado said access to computing infrastructure needed to be complemented by skills development to enable more Africans to build practical AI solutions.
He said the company, through its collaboration with Alliance4AI, supported AI education and skills development for professionals in sectors including medicine, logistics and finance.
He further said that the initiative had so far served about 2,000 developers, with GPU infrastructure deployed across seven African countries.
Tsado also said the initiative had supported more than 30 government AI use cases in areas including agriculture, customs, digital public infrastructure, mining and education.
He said expanding access to affordable computing infrastructure and AI skills would enable more African developers and organisations to develop and deploy AI solutions from within the continent.
Oluwafunmilayo Olumoko, Head of Customer Success at the company, said deploying infrastructure within African markets could provide users with computing resources closer to their users and data.
She said the approach could also support data residency and sovereign AI infrastructure requirements amid growing discussions around data sovereignty.
Olumoko said the company’s dedicated GPU virtual machines, combined with optimised open-source large language models, could deliver savings of up to 60 per cent in token costs for organisations running AI applications at scale. (NAN)
Edited by Uche Anunne
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