South Africa IT Spending Surges as AI Infrastructure Investment Nearly Doubles
Gartner data shows South Africa's IT spending is outpacing global growth rates, with data centre investment reportedly nearly doubling as AI workloads drive local infrastructure demand. The figures signal a concrete shift from AI experimentation toward production-scale deployment in Africa's largest tech economy.
South Africa's AI Boom: buying the hardware, skipping the cloud
South Africa's data centre spending is forecast to nearly double this year — 90.6% growth against 62.7% globally, according to Gartner figures. That is a real, concrete signal that AI infrastructure is landing locally, not just being discussed at conferences.
But one number cuts against the optimism: cloud capacity (what Gartner calls IaaS) is growing slower here than the global average, and sits at just 1.6% of local IT spend versus 4.5% worldwide.
South Africa is building the rooms but not fully turning on the lights. Servers without the software layer on top of them are expensive assets, not a functioning AI economy. The question is whether local cloud adoption catches up — or whether the continent ends up hosting infrastructure that mostly serves workloads owned elsewhere.
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- South African IT spending surging as AI boom lands locally · techcentral.co.za · T2