South Africa has invested R484 million over four years in AI, blockchain, and related technologies to build foundational digital capabilities in the public sector, Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation Blade Nzimande confirmed in response to a parliamentary question.
The funding supports the Foundational Digital Capabilities Research (FDCR) platform and the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR) – a national research network across nine universities, including the University of Cape Town, Pretoria, Stellenbosch, and Sol Plaatje University.
CAIR focuses on areas such as machine learning, AI ethics, adaptive systems, and AI for development, with emerging efforts in swarm intelligence and speech technologies. In 2025/26 alone, R98.5 million was allocated to FDCR.
South Africa’s AI research is further bolstered by work at the CSIR, which explores generative AI, computer vision, and natural language processing.
According to a recent University of Oxford study on AI compute sovereignty, South Africa hosts four AI-focused data centres – two capable of training large AI models and two suited for running them. It is the only African country with such infrastructure and ranks among the top 13 countries globally for AI compute regions.
This places South Africa alongside nations like Japan, South Korea, France, and Australia, and ahead of manufacturing hubs like Taiwan and the Netherlands, signaling a strong AI infrastructure presence despite trailing global leaders like the U.S. (26) and China (22).
Nzimande emphasized that AI is applied across all five digital research domains identified in South Africa’s Decade-Long Plan, which include cybersecurity, cloud computing, and digital twins, among others – positioning the country for long-term innovation and global AI competitiveness.
