Uganda is set to host Africa’s first Artificial Intelligence (AI) factory, inside the 600MW Karuma Hydropower Plant on the River Nile.
- •The Aeonian Project, a 100MW hyperscale facility that will house sovereign AI factories is backed by global partners including Germany’s GIZ, Finland’s HAUS, the EU Development Fund, and other European investors.
- •The Aeonian Project will be rolled out in stages: Its first phase, comprising a 15MW AI module and the 10MW supercomputer, will go live in the second half of 2026 while the remaining five modules will be completed by 2028.
- •The project run entirely on renewable energy, making it one of the world’s greenest AI facilities.
“This is about empowering Africa to control its data backbone responsibly, sustainably, and sovereignly,” said Oladele Oyekunle, CEO of Synectics Technologies at a press briefing in Nairobi.
Almost all of Africa’s data—about 98%—is processed outside the continent. The Aeonian Project aims to change that, keeping critical computing power at home and allowing African researchers and developers to build AI models in local languages and grounded in African data.
At the heart of the project is a 10MW sovereign supercomputer named USIO. Built in partnership with U.S. chipmaker NVIDIA, AI infrastructure firm MDCS.AI, and Belgium’s Automation NV, USIO will be powered by NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell GPU platform, and draw on 100MW excess pre-transmission electricity fro the Karuma power plant.
“In the same way gold and oil once shaped economies, digital tokens will shape the next era of innovation. Africa must not just mine data, but also mint intelligence, the machine targets to support applications in healthcare, life sciences, higher education, and research ” said Niels Van Rees, Co-Founder of MDCS.AI.
Each factory will use smart infrastructure systems to keep energy consumption low and ensure sustainable operations. “By combining new energy with intelligent cooling and modular data center technologies, we are helping build a future where Africa’s data is processed sustainably, securely, and locally,” said Ifeanyi Odoh, Country President, Schneider Electric East Africa.
The facility will use natural river water cooling, modular heat reuse, and a new 2,500km fiber optic backbone linking Uganda to international cables through Kenya and Tanzania.