A new sovereign supercomputer in Uganda could shift the continent from exporting raw data to producing sovereign AI.
For decades, Africa has been rich in raw materials but poor in processing. Oil. Gold. Cobalt. Cocoa. Even people. The continent exports abundance, yet captures little of the value. By 2021, commodities made up more than 80% of Africa’s total exports, most of it refined elsewhere.
Now the raw material is data. And once again, Africa risks repeating history.
The World Bank projects that by 2025, the internet economy could add nearly $180 billion to Africa’s GDP. Nineteen of the world’s twenty fastest-growing countries are on the continent. By 2050, Africa’s population will reach 2.5 billion. The potential is not in doubt – the question is whether the value will be captured at home or siphoned abroad.
Yet, without a means to bring the 70% to 90% of total exports currently processed abroad and tie this locally, with on-site processing of commodities, data, and talent, little can be done.
Now, on the banks of the River Nile, a bold project is trying to break that cycle. Synectics Technologies, an ESG-focused digital infrastructure company, is building what it calls The Aeonian Project: Africa’s first sovereign supercomputer and modular AI Factory ecosystem. Anchored at Uganda’s 600MW Karuma Hydropower Plant, Aeonian fuses green energy, hyperscale compute, and sovereign control in what has been touted as the most ambitious data infrastructure project ever attempted on the continent.
If it works, Aeonian will shift Africa from storing data to minting intelligence.
The stakes could not be higher. Without sovereign compute, the continent risks remaining a digital colony – exporting raw data only to re-import intelligence at a premium. With it, Africa can process its own information, train models in its own languages, and build services rooted in its own realities. In the age of artificial intelligence, where tokens have become the new oil, sovereignty has become the new language of competitiveness.
For Oladele Oyekunle, Synectics’ Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, existing African data centers are built mainly for colocation: hosting racks, ensuring uptime, and connecting networks. They store information but do not compute at scale.
“Existing data centres have limited or no computing capacity,” Oyekunle says. “They simply store data. Artificial Intelligence has changed everything by providing computing power to process the data to deliver use cases in research, academics, medicine, climate control, banking & finance.”
He offers an anecdote: “We did some work internally last year that took us roughly eight months. We did similar work this year using AI tools and it took us 48 hours.”
Aeonian will roll out in six modular phases totaling 100MW. The first, KRM1, combines a 10MW sovereign supercomputer with a 15MW AI Factory. Each subsequent module (KRM2–KRM6) adds another 15MW. Within each factory, 5MW is dedicated to NVIDIA HGX-powered compute clusters, with the rest reserved for colocation and on-demand cloud.
At the heart of KRM1 is USIO, Africa’s first sovereign supercomputer, which will be built around NVIDIA’s DGX Blackwell GB300 GPU platform. “Current power densities in existing datacentres are between 3 and 20kW per rack,” Oyekunle notes. “AI requires over 100kW per rack. In a few years, some of the NVIDIA GPUs will be running at over 800kW per rack! And that is why we say internally that Africa can no longer afford to grow organically.”
Aeonian’s rack densities will range from 20kW to over 132kW – numbers unheard of in the region. “The USIO supercomputer is the first for Africa and is similar to the LUMI and Gefion supercomputers, though, at 10MW capacity, it is larger,” Oyekunle says.
Aeonian is built on green credentials as much as sovereign ambition. Powered entirely by Karuma’s hydropower, cooled by water from the Nile, and designed with a PUE below 1.2, it will be Africa’s greenest hyperscale facility, residing on 80 acres of land.. “By digitalizing clean energy through best-in-class infrastructure, we are empowering Africa to control its data backbone responsibly, sustainably, and sovereignly,” says Oyekunle.
Beyond Infrastructure: Africa’s AI Center of Excellence
Beyond the physical infrastructure, the project also includes the launch of a dedicated AI Center of Excellence, the Synectics Centre of Artificial Intelligence & Innovation, established in close collaboration with MDCS.AI and a network of local and international ecosystem partners. This center will focus on managing the digital facilities, skills development, research and development, and innovation, ensuring that Africa not only builds sovereign AI capacity but also cultivates the talent and ecosystems needed to sustain it.
USIO will not only autonomously manage the physical and digital facilities eventually but will also provide a sovereign platform for high-performance computing in use cases ranging from Healthcare and Agriculture through Higher Education & Research to Climate Science and Financial Services.
According to Oyekunle, the choice of Uganda came down to power, geography, and politics. “Uganda had quite a bit of excess energy reserve around their dams which were trapped there due to limited grid availability at that point. We designed the project to use the energy at its source,” he says. “The 100MW all-green energy we have is one-sixth of the capacity of the newly built 600MW Karuma Hydropower plant. To put this in perspective, total connected power in a neighbouring country is about 320MW. Half of that, at about 160MW, is hydro, compared to the 100MW dedicated capacity which we have.”
Today’s growing compute requirements are constrained largely by power. Every model training run and inference depends on a chain of electricity that starts at high-voltage feeds and ends at racks in a data hall. At hyperscale, a single lease can consume as much energy as a small city, and the difference between a power usage effectiveness of 1.2 and 1.4 can determine whether an operator thrives or bleeds cash. That is why Synectics anchored Aeonian at Karuma: 100MW of stranded green hydropower is an incredible competitive moat in a continent where power is in short supply.
The political support mattered too. “We got great support from H.E. Kaguta Museveni (the President of Uganda) who provided not just the capacity but also at subsidized rates comparable to Europe,” Oyekunle notes. Uganda’s government has granted regulatory concessions and long-term backing to the project. Its central geography means Aeonian can serve neighbors like Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, and the DRC, Burundi while plugging into submarine cable landings in Kenya and Tanzania.
While Uganda is the host, the aspirations are regional. “Combined data center capacity in East Africa is less than 25MW,” Oyekunle explains. “We can comfortably provide disaster recovery for the entire region.”
But the deepest rationale is demographic. “About 70% of Africa’s population is young people,” he says. “The Aeonian project is developed to put 15–17 million of such young people to work indirectly as entrepreneurs, by placing computing power in their hands. This is the bedrock of the project.”
It may be tempting to think the project is awash with investor cash. “We have basically bootstrapped the project from the onset using directors’ and shareholders’ funds,” Randy Wright, Chairman of Synectics, admits. That gave Synectics early credibility, but scaling to 100MW requires bigger backers. “We are now supported technically and financially by the Finnish Government and the European Union through HAUS, DIF and GIZ. It is public knowledge that the EU is committed to €300 billion in digital infrastructure investment globally. Half of that is focused towards Africa.”
This project is not without some skepticism. The industry is littered with similar announcements of megawatt projects. Some observers have raised familiar red flags: power reliability, currency volatility, and the risk of political shifts unsettling concessions. Even with Karuma’s 600MW capacity, can transmission remain stable? Will subsidized rates hold for decades?
Demand is another question. Will enterprises and governments adopt sovereign infrastructure quickly enough to justify the cost? And with hyperscalers still expanding aggressively across Africa, Aeonian must compete not only on sovereignty but also on price and performance.
Financing, too, is uncertain. Development finance institutions within Africa have largely stayed on the sidelines. As Oyekunle noted, “they want the cake fully baked before participating even though digital infrastructure finance requires non traditional perspectives at this stage, and not just in Africa.”
Yet he rejects the skepticism as misplaced. “These are exactly the reasons Africa must build sovereign infrastructure now,” he argues. “If we continue to depend on foreign systems, we remain exposed to the very vulnerabilities critics highlight. By anchoring power at the source, designing for high density, and working with committed partners, we are showing that Africa can solve these challenges on its own terms. It is always impossible until someone does it..”
The Aeonian is not just about racks and megawatts. It is about control. Today, when more than 90% of African data is processed abroad, the continent exports not just information but also opportunity.
At the heart of Aeonian is a 100MW ecosystem anchored in Uganda’s Karuma hydropower plant – Africa’s first sovereign supercomputer and AI Factory. Unlike traditional data centers, Aeonian is designed for computation: high-density racks, liquid cooling, and modular design that can scale with new generations of GPUs. Developed with partners including MDCS.AI – Elite Partners to NVIDIA -, Automation NV, Schneider Electric, and backed by European institutions such as the EU Development Fund (EUD) and HAUS, the project marries clean stable renewable power with cutting-edge efficiency.
“AI is power-hungry – training a model like ChatGPT consumes nearly ten times more electricity than conventional workloads,” said Ifeanyi Odoh of Schneider Electric. “We need to be super-efficient with cooling, power, and IT integration. EcoStruxure allows us to do predictive and prescriptive maintenance, ensuring resilience and cybersecurity at the core.”
With East Africa’s connected capacity still under 25MW, Aeonian’s 10MW sovereign supercomputer and five AI Factory modules could support the entire region, unlocking use cases from healthcare breakthroughs to academic research and financial services. “Africa needs to tell its story now,” added Adegbiji. “This 80-acre digital city can turn clean energy into intelligence, and talent into exports.”
In the AI era, tokens – the fragments of data models use to learn – are the new oil. “It is no longer enough to store data, but more important to also compute and process the data. That is the new future,” Oyekunle says.
Raymond Drielinger, Founder of MDCS.AI, an elite Nvidia partner, puts it in context: “In the same way gold and oil once shaped economies, tokens will shape the next era of innovation. Africa must not just mine data, but also mint intelligence.”
By keeping computation local, Aeonian could allow researchers to train models in African languages, startups to build AI grounded in local realities, and governments to run sensitive services on sovereign platforms. It could help Africa move from consumer to contributor in the global AI economy.
The initial of the USIO supercomputer – 2.5MW – launches in Q2 2026, scaling to 10MW by Q4 2026. The 15MW AI Factory unit is expected by 2027, with subsequent modules following through 2028.
By then, Aeonian may represent more than just Africa’s largest data project. It could mark a continental shift in mindset: from exporting raw data to minting intelligence.
Randy Wright, Synectics’ Chairman, explains: “The Aeonian Project is not just a data center. It is a continental milestone in technological sovereignty. By anchoring artificial intelligence, green energy, and sovereign compute in East Africa, we are igniting a future where Africa builds and owns its digital destiny.”
The gamble is immense. So are the rewards.
Can Africa mint its own intelligence? Absolutely, says the Aeonian Project.
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