Google has opened a product development centre in Nairobi, its first in the continent, seeking to build products and services for the African market and also the whole world.
The centre is Google’s second major research and development investment in Africa, after setting up an AI and research centre in Ghana in 2019.
Google says it will hire over 100 people, including software engineers, researchers and designers over the next two years. This will help in solving difficult and technical challenges such as improving the smartphone experience for people in Africa, or building a more reliable internet infrastructure.
Google joins the growing list of tech giants setting up innovation hubs in Nairobi. Two weeks ago and shortly after Microsoft launched a research and development centre in Nairobi, Visa announced that it had set up its first innovation centre to co-create payment and commerce solutions with partners.
Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon providing on-demand cloud computing platforms, has also recently announced plans to launch an AWS local zone in Kenya. The new AWS Local Zone in Kenya will join other 16 existing AWS Local Zones across the US and another 32 AWS Local Zones planned to launch in 26 countries around the world starting in 2022.
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