Microsoft will invest $290 million over the next two years in South Africa on AI and cloud infrastructure, vice chair and president Brad Smith announced. At an event with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in Johannesburg Thursday, Smith said the investment will help the country’s ambition to become a globally competitive AI economy.
It has built massive datacenters in the past three years in Johannesburg and Cape Town, a $1.1 billion investment. Microsoft is also paying for the certification process for 50,000 young South Africans so they can get qualifications for their digital skills studies. Smith says this is part of the plan to provide education to Africa’s youngsters, then provide them with certification of having learned those skills to “help” them get a job.
The high-demand skills include AI, data science, cybersecurity analysis and cloud solution architecture. This is even more important, he stresses. These are precisely the certificates and skills that win people jobs.
We're in effect paying for people so they can get the training and take the certification exams, Smith told me. With a Microsoft certificate for something like cloud architecture or cyber security or AI, you're going to be able to get a job. With its endemic poverty, paying for education is a problem for millions of youngsters. But not everybody can afford to even take the exam to get that certificate, says Smith.
More on Microsoft’s AI Datacenter and education efforts in Africa
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