Zimbabwe Billionaire Financing Solar and Data Center Hub

Strive Masiyiwa, who sits on Netflix’s board, is Zimbabwe’s only billionaire but has reportedly not returned to his country of birth since 2000. However, earlier this month, he surprised market observers by announcing financing for a 300-hectare hybrid green energy and large-scale data center industrial park that will power AI and logistics operations.

Startup owners are thrilled that green energy and big data infrastructure are breaking out of the Big 5 African nations (Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, and Nigeria), which Silicon Valley has confined itself to in past deals.

Econet Wireless, the largest telecoms company in Zimbabwe, which Mr. Masiyiwa founded, and in which he is still the largest shareholder, has reserved space for this latest venture close to the Robert Mugabe International Airport, the country’s flagship airport. A massive 100MW solar power plant will be installed on the site.

Workers in Cape Town, South Africa, are connecting solar panels to power an AI center financed by Masiyiwa. Photo provided by author.

“Our vision is to create infrastructure, such as power and water facilities, needed for a modern industrial park. This will make it easier for investors to come in, take advantage of the location, and create jobs,” Douglas Mboweni, the CEO in charge of the project, says. 

Situating power plants, waterworks, and data centers on the doorstep of an ambitious aviation hub will encourage startups to take advantage of export-import operations in Zimbabwe and across the region. In addition, this will be the largest hybrid clean energy and data centre hub in Zimbabwe, a country with just 3 data centers for a population of 18 million.

Observers in Zimbabwe and the region say there is a reason Mr. Masiyiwa is deploying significant capital in a homeland he has rarely visited in recent years.

Breaking ground on a data center. Photo provided by the author.

“There is a clear winner in investing in and connecting data centers and old school logistics in Africa, a continent where, according to the US International Trade Commission, e-commerce will soar to 520 million users in 2025 vs 281 million just five years earlier,” says Tawanda Chitiyo, a budding startup owner in Mutare City, Zimbabwe. Chitiyo’s proprietary tech is building a biorefinery that turns waste into energy with transmission secured via the blockchain.

As a player in the energy startup sector, he says that in many African countries, there is a handicap that slows the uptake of datacenter infrastructure compared to peer regions such as Asia or Middle Eastern tiger economies like Saudi Arabia and Dubai.

“The dilemma is electricity, not servers and processors, where to find the energy to power data centers. Africa is so energy-deficient that diverting critical coal or thermal energy electricity to data centers could make homes in cities go dark – and that’s politically sensitive. This is where privately financed solar or wind power plants jump in with a scalable solution,” he says.

This is evident in Zimbabwe, a country with high solar irradiation potential but only 500MW of installed solar power. On the coal and thermal energy front, Zimbabwe has just 1500MW of installed capacity, a generation that’s smaller than the city of Newark, NJ. That’s a dismal level of electricity generation– and this mirrors much of Africa, a continent where 600 million residents still lack any connection to the grid at all. But that deficiency is now a golden opportunity for private equity financiers like Mr. Masiyiwa to jump in and finance their own wind or solar electricity plants to power data centers, bypassing a lackluster government. This potential was outlined by Nilza Mazive, co-founder of Xiphefu, a startup powering homes across Southern Africa with smart tech and renewable energy. 

After all, Mr. Masiyiwa is not new to financing deals in the data center and energy space. In September, Mr. Masiyiwa announced plans to build 5 AI factories across Africa in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, and Morocco. The purpose is to unleash massive computing power to meet the artificial intelligence needs of Africa’s health tech, mining, education, agriculture, tourism, etc. He has sunk $720 million into his inter-Africa AI factories drive, with the flagship site in South Africa set to run 3,000 powerful Nvidia graphics processors.

The work to build AI centers across Africa continues to gain momentum.

Locating data centers in Africa and pairing them with on-site wind or solar power plants is smart because geography matters in tech and energy innovation, adds Chitiyo, the biorefinery startup founder. 

“We lag the world,” he says, lamenting that the continent has punched below its weight in an age of multiple options like affordable modular battery power storage, wind, and solar power.

“The majority of AI projects running in Africa’s hospitals, banks, power plants, or government offices right now are tethered to cloud servers in Europe, in Belgium, the UK, or North America. That’s not only expensive, slow, but prone to large-scale attacks and data loss,” he says, citing how ports in South Africa were held to ransom in 2021 when sophisticated offshore hackers compromised IT systems. 

Mr. Masiyiwa’s foray into Zimbabwe with data centers and on-site solar power plants is a way of “democratizing” green energy and data center economies beyond the Big 5 African economies that the likes of Meta, Amazon AWS, or Alphabet have prioritized, he adds.

“This will open access to high-computing power and renewable energy and lower costs for startups in the other 47 smaller economy African countries that Western and Chinese tech are overlooking,” he says.