Cassava Technologies, the pan-African technology group founded by Strive Masiyiwa, says it has become authorised to resell access to Anthropic's Claude models through Amazon Bedrock. The announcement, distributed by APO Group on 27 October, gives organisations across Africa "another route" to the models, in the company's words.
Bedrock is Amazon Web Services' platform for building and running generative AI applications. Companies use it to plug a model into their own software and processes instead of building one. Claude, made by the US company Anthropic, handles reasoning, image analysis, code generation and several languages, according to Cassava's release.
What changes for African buyers
The change is who African customers buy from. Cassava's reseller status gives them a way to reach Claude through a local partner focused on businesses on the continent, the company says. Cassava sells connectivity, data centre space, cloud, cybersecurity, AI computing and payments, mostly to enterprise customers, in 37 countries, according to the release.
"What matters to our customers is being able to use AI in their business, and that starts with access to the best models," said Hardy Pemhiwa, Cassava's president and group chief executive. "Our goal is simple, advanced AI within reach of every business, government, researcher, entrepreneur and university across the emerging markets globally."
The announcement leaves the details a buyer would want open:
- Which Claude models are included.
- Pricing, and how customers will be billed.
- Which countries get the service first, and from when.
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Cassava is deploying an Nvidia-powered "AI Factory" at its South African data centres and has launched a GPU-as-a-service offer, according to TechTrendsKE. Last week the World Bank Group named it a knowledge partner in an initiative to give emerging-market governments shared, pay-as-you-go access to AI computing power, the outlet reports. A Claude resale deal adds a model that customers ask for by name to that infrastructure.
