AI Architect, Alex Tsado speaking at tech/AI event. Photo Courtesy: Alliance for Africa's Intelligence
By Conrad Onyango, Bird Story Agency….
When Alexander Tsado talks about artificial intelligence, he talks about everyday people, farmers, students, and health workers in small towns across Africa and how their lives could change if they had access to the same powerful tools driving innovation in Silicon Valley.
“Imagine an old woman in a rural area who is sick. Today, she must travel 10 hours to see a doctor in the city. But with a GPU box nearby, a local pharmacist can use a mobile phone or a device to access information and help her immediately. That’s transformational,” Tsado explained in an interview with bird.
Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), is a powerful computer chip that runs AI. Tsado sees similar potential in education, local governance, and agriculture as among key sectors where AI could deliver real, grassroots impact.
“I choose to use AI to bring opportunities and access to more people in the world including those in villages that do not have access today,” he said.
Tsado is arguably one of Africa’s most visible advocates for inclusive AI, a growing movement of people who imagine the continent not as a late adopter, but as a builder of the next generation of global technology.
While many describe him as an “AI Evangelist,” he prefers to be best described as an “AI architect,” as he continues to work on an ambitious goal of putting up a GPU in every African village.
“We’ll use our proprietary software to connect all those GPUs so people can access them wherever they are. That way, the people learning about AI in the villages can also build AI solutions,” he said, eyes lighting up.
Tsado who is currently based in California, was born and raised up in Benin City, Nigeria. His journey to becoming Africa’s loudest AI advocate and architect started when he was 13 years old.
At the time his parents, who he said were both working in the healthcare industry, had hired a tutor during one of the school holidays.
The teacher helped him to cover three years of mathematics in a record four months.
“Before then, I was middle of my class at position 23 out of 50. But when I went back to school, I knew everything about maths. I became the top student in the public secondary school,” Tsado recalled.
That experience ignited a lifelong fascination with learning and problem-solving, leading him to Columbia University in New York, to study electrical engineering.
It is here that he earned a scholarship after building a radio set as part of his application and where he also developed a fascination for African history.
“I started learning about hundreds of years of African innovation. Five hundred years ago, we made the most important technologies but over time, we were silenced. My mission is to bring Africa back to the innovation table,” he affirmed.
That mission deepened when he joined Nvidia, now the world’s most valuable company, back in 2016, way long before its name was known outside tech circles.
At Nvidia he was given the responsibility to start thinking about the cloud market and to help the biggest cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google understand AI.
“Imagine that, teaching them about AI, about GPUs, and convincing them why those chips were important,” he recalled.
Today, that cloud business he said generates about US$50 billion a year for Nvidia and forms the backbone of the global AI boom.
That is where his title ‘AI architect’ came from. By 2019, Tsado had come to a stark realization that while artificial intelligence was transforming industries around the world, Africa was largely missing from that conversation.
That year, he established Alliance4AI, a global nonprofit dedicated to accelerating AI adoption across the continent. The organization is currently executing a 10-year roadmap focused on training African talent, mobilizing local data, and securing GPU infrastructure to power homegrown innovation.
Under Tsado’s leadership, the Alliance created the inaugural Africa Pavilion at the UN’s AI for Good Summit and published the continent’s first ‘Top 100 African AI Startups’ list, which spotlighted groundbreaking ventures in agriculture, healthcare, and fintech.
The initiative drew the attention of global institutions like UNESCO and the Rockefeller Foundation.
“They reached out saying, ‘We didn’t know there was any AI being built in Africa.’ That was when people began to pay attention,” Tsado said.
Five years into the project, Tsado launched Udutech, an African AI infrastructure and implementation company, in February 2025 to turn his vision for accessible hardware into reality.
By June, Udutech had activated the Africa GPU Hub, the first live indigenous platform to provide GPU access to African startups, universities, and innovators.
Since then, companies such as Cassava Technologies, which has announced plans to invest US$150 million in building five large supercomputers, have revealed similar ambitions to develop GPU infrastructure. However, their models take a different approach.
“Their strategy is similar to the U.S., to build a few huge supercomputers that Africans can benefit from. Our approach is different. We are providing software for GPU clusters like theirs to reach people effectively. We’re also building smaller GPU systems that can fit even in a village, using less than one megawatt of power and bringing AI sovereignty to every African Nation,” he explained.
Each GPU system unit developed by Udutech costs under US$150,000, making it accessible to banks, telecom operators, and philanthropic organizations that can combine as many of these as they want.
Tsado noted that philanthropic groups are helping to subsidize access for universities and early-stage innovators, while banks and funded startups are showing strong interest in setting up GPU hubs as shared resources.
Demand, he added, is growing fastest in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and Uganda.
“The African AI we’re building is about access not super intelligence. We have enough energy for small systems that can transform life even for the poorest African,” he added.
Tsado envisions nurturing up to 1,000 AI builders, a new generation of young African developers, data scientists, and policymakers, to design AI ecosystems that reflect the continent’s unique realities, cultures, and languages.
His goal is to enable these innovators to build digital infrastructure that will drive inclusion and innovation big enough to significantly cut down poverty across Africa.
“If we continue being consumers, the number of people living in poverty will double by 2050.But if we build infrastructure and access, like China and India did, we can reverse that,” he said.
The World Bank shares a similar outlook, with its latest projections showing that the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide fell from about 2.3 billion in 1990 to around 831 million in 2025.
The sharp decline, the Bank notes, was driven largely by broad-based economic growth in East and South Asia.
However, it warns that poverty has become increasingly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and in regions affected by conflict and fragility.
“Although a necessary condition, economic growth is not enough to break the cycle of poverty. Stronger investments in infrastructure, human capital, and institutions are essential for people to climb the socioeconomic ladder and escape extreme poverty,” said the World Bank.
