The Grid Inside the Grid
Originally published by The Elephant — Read the original article →
In March, when Cassava Technologies announced the launch of an AI factory powered by NVIDIA in South Africa, the company described it as a turning point. African businesses would gain local access to high-performance computing. Data would remain within African borders. Developers would be able to build models for local languages and local problems.
The promise matters. African researchers and firms cannot participate meaningfully in artificial intelligence if they must rent every unit of computing power from servers abroad. But the most consequential infrastructure inside an AI factory may not be the graphics processor. It may be the electricity connection.
Artificial intelligence is exceptionally energy hungry. The International Energy Agency expects global electricity consumption by data centers to nearly double by 2030. The pressure is not evenly distributed. Data centers cluster in particular cities and industrial corridors, where their demand can collide with already constrained transmission systems.
