Google raises African AI bet as Big Tech looks to continent

Matias said motivation for the new funding stemmed from the impact of Google’s existing AI projects in Africa. One such effort is a housing dataset project that started as an attempt to map building density in Ghana using machine learning and satellite imagery, then grew to encompass more countries.

“It scaled, and we now have about 1.8 billion buildings around the world, especially in the Global South, captured on maps done by a project led by a team in Accra,” Matias told Semafor.

Google researchers in Africa also collaborated on producing the company’s Flood Hub platform for forecasting floods in 100 countries including more than 40 in Africa. That work underscores the “amazing, very strong research team we have in Africa,” he said.

The world’s biggest tech companies have stepped up AI activities in Africa over the past year through cash investments or research collaborations. They are increasingly tapping into a rapidly growing appetite for digitization and automation in daily life and commerce, despite a continued widespread lack of some of the basic infrastructure required for an African digital economy — especially electricity.

Google’s latest investment follows smaller-scale AI efforts it has made recently, such as a fund floated last year to offer Nigerian startups $6,000 in equity-free funding. The $37 million package is the company’s largest commitment to African AI specifically, though its overall pledge to African tech — which CEO Sundar Pichai announced four years ago — is $1 billion.

Google for Startups Accelerator, the company’s platform for investing in early-stage startups, has worked with more than 150 African startups with investments of over $300 million to date. The program’s most recent cohort began last month and included 15 startups from seven countries, including Ethiopia and Rwanda.

The View From Silicon Valley

Earlier this year, Microsoft said it will invest $297 million in its AI business in South Africa where it has data centers, by 2027. It also committed $1 million on AI training to reach one million Nigerians, based on an expectation that the country’s AI market will grow 27% annually between now and 2030.

In June, Meta rolled out an accelerator program that will offer equity-free funding to back startups creating “scalable, socially relevant AI tools” in partnership with the tech policymakers in Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, and South Africa.

This month, Open AI published the results of a research collaboration with Penda Heath, a Kenyan primary care chain that receives nearly half a million patient visits a year. The study on 40,000 patients said Penda’s AI assistant for clinicians showed a 16% reduction in diagnostic errors and a 13% reduction in treatment errors, Open AI said.

• Intron AI, a Nigerian speech transcription platform for African accents, is expanding beyond an initial focus on health care to court courtrooms and call centers operated by banks and telecom companies.