This is the executive summary of an in-depth audit of Google’s footprint in Africa. The full report is available on the Download PDF button.
The pledge - First mile - Data centres - Gemini lock-in - Cassava - MoUs - AfCFTA - Transparency - Partner or predator
The pledge
In February 2022, at the African Union Summit business forum, Google CEO Sundar Pichai committed US$1 billion over five years to “accelerate Africa’s digital transformation”. The money was promised across four pillars: affordable internet access, support for startups and SMEs, digitisation for enterprises and governments, and nonprofit support. By September 2025, Google’s Senior VP James Manyika told Bloomberg the company had “exceeded the $1 billion mark”.
The headline obscures more than it reveals. Google has never published an audited breakdown of how the pledge was allocated across pillars, years or countries. The same large figures recur in different combinations across Google blog posts without reconciliation. Smaller commitments are announced more than once.
More strikingly, the assets documented in this report — two undersea cables, extensive overland cabling, the Johannesburg cloud region, four planned hubs — represent capital expenditure that, on industry-norm benchmarks, runs to several billion dollars in its own right. None of it is visibly contained within the pledge envelope. The defensible reading is that Google’s actual African commitment over 2022–2026 is materially larger than US$1 billion, quite possibly multiples of it. The absence of disclosure makes the true number unknowable from outside. The recycled headline figure is doing communications work, not financial-disclosure work.
First mile
Subsea cables are the pipes that carry the internet into Africa. Google now owns two of them. Equiano, named for the 18th-century abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, has been operational since 2022 with landings in Togo, Nigeria, Namibia, St Helena and South Africa; Google’s own commissioned impact assessments project around 21% lower retail internet prices and faster speeds in landing countries. Umoja, announced in 2024 and targeting completion in 2027, will be the first fibre route directly connecting Africa to Australia. In September 2025 Google announced four further infrastructure hubs — north, south, east and west — each combining cable landing stations with adjacent data-centre capacity.
Once those hubs are operational, Google together with Meta will account for an estimated 65–75% of new high-capacity subsea capacity being built into the continent. That is a level of single-hyperscaler concentration without precedent in African connectivity infrastructure.
It is also a snapshot, not a permanent state. SEACOM 2.0 — financed entirely by African and Aga Khan institutional shareholders, with no hyperscaler or development-bank equity — is targeted for service in 2029–2030, with design capacity larger than every hyperscaler cable to Africa combined.
Data centres
An African government, bank, hospital or university choosing Google Cloud today is choosing one of two destinations for its data: a single building in Johannesburg, or somewhere abroad. There is no second Google Cloud region on the continent. Customers who want to keep data in-country in Lagos, Nairobi or Cape Town can do so — but only by stepping outside Google Cloud and running their own infrastructure in third-party colocation facilities, which gives up the managed-service layer that is the reason most customers choose Google Cloud in the first place.
Google’s African cloud capacity sits in one full region in Johannesburg, operational since January 2024. No second region elsewhere on the continent has been announced. The four planned interconnect sites in Cape Town, Lagos, Nairobi and Johannesburg are doorways into Google’s global network, not local processing facilities. Any workload that runs through them ends up either in Johannesburg or, more often, in one of Google’s regions in Europe or the United States.
The Johannesburg region itself sits inside a Teraco campus. Google is the tenant, not the owner. Teraco is a subsidiary of Digital Realty, a US-listed real-estate investment trust. The building through which essentially all African Google Cloud traffic flows is therefore, in legal terms, US-headquartered and exposed under the CLOUD Act — the US law that lets American authorities compel US-headquartered firms to hand over data held anywhere in the world.
“Sovereign AI” and “digital agency” are the words Google and its African partners use to describe this arrangement. The harder question, which the public-policy documents do not address, is what sovereignty means when there is one African building where the data can sit and a US-controlled landlord operating it.
Gemini lock-in
Beneath the headline US$1 billion infrastructure pledge sits a less-discussed second pledge: the free distribution of Gemini.
Across at least six named programmes — the 12-month AI Pro Plan announced for students in eight African countries, the Gemini for Education tier free to every signed-up institution, the training of 25,000 Nigerian educators, the Kenyan Cabinet-launched university rollout, the AfCFTA ADIEP programme delivered through the Google Hustle Academy, and Google’s continental commitment to train three million Africans in digital and AI skills — Google has committed an estimated five to seven million Gemini-access seats for African distribution between 2025 and 2030. The notional retail value, at the AI Pro tier, is approximately US$1.0 to 1.6 billion.
This is not a generic AI subsidy. Gemini’s free distribution runs only through Google’s own surfaces. Those surfaces are served from Google Cloud regions. Gemini training runs on Google-owned AI chips inside Google data centres. In Africa those data centres are reached through Google-owned subsea cables and Google-anchor-tenant interconnection campuses.
The whole vertical stack — cable, data centre, model, app — is the product. The free Gemini is how Google fills it with users. The two are sized to fill each other.
Cassava
Strive Masiyiwa has been among the most articulate champions of African scientific and digital sovereignty — through Econet, Liquid Intelligent Technologies (now part of Cassava Technologies), his service as the African Union Special Envoy on COVID-19 coordinating the Africa Vaccine Acquisition Task Team, his role as Special Advisor to African Presidents on US/Africa food security, and his ongoing engagement with the AU’s continental AI agenda. Cassava Technologies — the company that now houses Liquid’s continental fibre, data-centre and cloud business — is the closest thing Africa has to a sovereign hyperscaler-scale infrastructure platform.
The single question that defines Cassava Technologies’ new position is whether it remains an anchor of African digital sovereignty, or has become an anchor tenant of Google’s African expansion.
The 2025 Cassava–Google partnership places that platform inside Google’s commercial estate. Cassava operates Africa’s first NVIDIA AI factory, hosts a sovereign-cloud overlay, and acts as Google’s preferred distribution partner for Gemini-based enterprise services across the continent. The arrangement is commercially defensible: Cassava gains scale, capital efficiency and product access it could not assemble independently in the available window; Google gains a credible African front-of-house for a continent-wide cloud and AI offer.
The harder question is structural. Cassava’s revenue, technology stack and customer pitch are now materially dependent on Google’s roadmap, pricing and licensing terms. Liquid’s fibre carries Google traffic into Cassava data centres that host Google services running on Google-licensed chips. The independence position from which Masiyiwa has historically argued for African sovereignty is, at minimum, harder to occupy from inside that stack.
MoUs
Alongside the commercial infrastructure sits an institutional one. Google has signed framework Memoranda of Understanding with each of the four bodies that matter for continental digital policy:
- the African Union Commission (February 2026, “AI for Government”, routed through the Infrastructure portfolio);
- the UN Economic Commission for Africa (February 2024, with a flagship Regional Data Commons launched November 2025);
- the AfCFTA Secretariat (delivered through the November 2025 ADIEP programme to train 7,500 SMEs in cross-border digital trade across nineteen countries);
- Smart Africa, where Google holds platinum membership.
None of these MoUs carries a published dollar value, governance mechanism or exit clause. All of them give Google a seat in the rooms where African AI and digital-trade rules are being written. The inaugural Africa AI Council — unveiled by the Smart Africa Board in Conakry on 17 November 2025, jointly selected by Smart Africa, the African Union Commission and the ITU — names Google’s Managing Director for Sub-Saharan Africa, Alex Okosi, as one of its eight independent members.
This is the visible half of what is best understood as a deliberate two-track operating model. One track builds the cables, the cloud region, and the enterprise customer base. The other runs the MoUs, the AU and ECA work, the commissioned policy blueprints, the educator partnerships, and the platinum memberships.
The two tracks reinforce each other. A free training programme delivered through an AU-endorsed MoU builds the user base for the commercial cloud. Commercial infrastructure investment builds the credibility that secures the next MoU. Each individual deal performs double duty. Each track de-risks the other. The institutional presence is not a marketing veneer over the commercial estate. It is structurally fused with it — and that is the design, not an accident.
AfCFTA
The African Continental Free Trade Area is the most ambitious economic instrument in Africa’s post-colonial history. Google is a key supporter. The AfCFTA Digital Inclusion & Entrepreneurship Programme (ADIEP) is a free training initiative targeting 7,500 small and medium-sized enterprises. Gemini sits at the heart of the training.
The Digital Trade Protocol is the rulebook for an eventual 1.4 billion-person market. It will determine how much control African states retain over data about their citizens, and whether African regulators will ever have the right to inspect the AI systems that foreign firms deploy on the continent.
The Protocol’s Articles 20 (free cross-border data flows), 22 (restrictions on data localisation) and 24 (prohibition on source-code disclosure requirements) closely mirror long-standing US negotiating positions on digital trade. The external technical-assistance ecosystem that ran in parallel with its drafting included Google-adjacent actors.
The Protocol does not sit in isolation. It sits inside a continental policy architecture built around three earlier AU instruments — the Data Policy Framework, the Continental AI Strategy, and the Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa 2020–2030. The central commitments of all three are data sovereignty, African ownership of digital public infrastructure, and the capacity to set continental rules without external capture.
The question this report raises, but does not claim to resolve, is whether the operating model documented in the MoUs above, the commissioned policy blueprints, and the financing architecture they assume is compatible with those commitments. Or whether AfCFTA implementation is being shaped, at the rulebook layer, by the very actor that stands to benefit most from the rules.
On the available evidence the alignment question is open. It is also, given AfCFTA’s significance, the most consequential question in this report.
Transparency
Across the workstreams documented here, transparency is the recurring weak link:
- Google’s US$1 billion 2022 pledge has never been broken down by country, year or workstream.
- The four MoUs with the African Union Commission, ECA, AfCFTA Secretariat and Smart Africa are unpublished — no disclosed text, deliverables, budgets or review mechanisms.
- The authorship of and external technical inputs to the AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol, whose Articles 20, 22 and 24 closely mirror long-standing US negotiating positions, are not on the public record.
- Cohort sizes and outcomes for the flagship skilling programmes are reported selectively.
- The ultimate destination of African user and enterprise data — Johannesburg, or onward to Google regions outside the continent — is not disclosed to end users, or in any granular form to host-country regulators.
Taken together, the public record is sufficient to map Google’s footprint in Africa. It is not sufficient to audit it.
Partner or predator
Google’s investments in Africa are not philanthropy. They are commercially rational.
One of the cornerstones of Google’s African strategy never appears as an explicit claim in any of Google’s own materials. However, three recent policy documents that Google has commissioned or co-funded to articulate the strategic case for AI in Africa (all authored by the CEO of an American think tank who also contributed to the Digital Trade Protocols), when read in aggregate, share a single unstated premise: that African states cannot finance the underlying digital infrastructure themselves, and that someone else has to do it for them.
The pattern across cables, cloud, free AI tools, equity stakes, institutional MoUs and policy advocacy is what the cloud industry itself calls a “land and expand” strategy. Free tools and cables build user habits; user habits build enterprise lock-in; enterprise lock-in justifies more infrastructure; more infrastructure deepens dependency.
The strategy is legal and well-executed, even where its individual components are only partially transparent. Its aggregate effect is to make African states structurally dependent on Google for the digital plumbing of their economies.
And the very legal frameworks that would constrain that dependency — data sovereignty laws, source-code review rights, digital services taxes — are simultaneously being lobbied against by the same Google executives who sign the partnership MoUs.