AI in Africa: Basics Over Buzz

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https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado8276

By ROSE M. MUTISO, Science. 

Excerpt: When Buti Manamela visited Lengau, one of Africa’s fastest supercomputers, he had more prosaic technology in mind: electricity. South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Higher Education, Science and Technology was at the Center for High Performance Computing in Cape Town for what should have been a showcase tour of a facility providing the country with the computing power needed to run and analyze the kinds of complex models and huge datasets that underpin artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). But Manamela was there to better understand the impact of South Africa’s rolling power blackouts on the center’s operations. Lengau, which means “cheetah” in Setswana, is one of the most important outposts in Africa’s AI infrastructure landscape; yet, it is struggling to operate at full capacity because of unreliable power. ...I’ve written before on the following connection: no power, no internet, no digital transformation. The entire digital ecosystem, from home internet connections to the base stations that underpin cellular networks to the data centers that store the internet's content, is powered by electricity. AI is just the latest manifestation of the long awaited digital revolution in Africa, only vastly more power hungry.... 

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