Industry Findings: Pan-regional infrastructure and capacity programmes have reframed buyer expectations across Middle East & Africa toward interoperable, sovereign-aware accelerator stacks that support distributed inference and pooled compute access. A continental policy milestone arrived with the African Union’s Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy in Jul-2024, which prioritised capability building, ethical governance and regional cooperation on compute and data infrastructure. That signal reduced policy fragmentation and pushed public purchasers and multilateral funders to favour processors that ship with provenance controls, privacy-preserving inference libraries and documented energy profiles. In the near term, ministries and regional research consortia will prioritise modular accelerators that integrate with shared cloud-edge fabrics and federated testbeds; over the medium term, expect pooled procurement and co-financed data-centre projects to increase demand for memory-rich, energy-efficient processors that vendors can supply with localised maintenance and certified observability toolchains.
Industry Player Insights: Prominent companies shaping the region’s competitive tone include Amazon Web Services, Orange, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, and Raxio etc. AWS and Orange announced a collaboration to extend AWS cloud services into Morocco and Senegal in May-2024, enabling telco-hosted, low-latency GPU instances for local customers and reducing the need to offshore sensitive workloads. Separately, the IFC-backed investment in Raxio Group mobilised a $100 million commitment in Apr-2025 to expand data-centre capacity across multiple African markets, which de-risks infrastructure investments and speeds availability of rack-level accelerator deployments. These vendor moves broaden in-region compute options, shorten procurement cycles for enterprises and public agencies, and incentivise systems integrators to offer pre-validated accelerator appliances with sovereign-compliant controls.