Three weeks before he resigned as Nvidia chief executive, Jensen Huang singled out Egypt and other African markets in an interview about where US technology companies should compete.
“There’s a reason why we’re in Africa,” he told Yahoo Finance at Nvidia’s conference in Berlin. “We want to compete everywhere.”
Huang resigned after Nvidia’s board met on Wednesday to consider removing him following reports of two extramarital affairs. One involved a Chinese businesswoman whom US authorities suspected of working for Beijing’s intelligence services, an allegation China denied. The other involved a senior Nvidia executive who reported to Huang, according to the New York Times.
Huang’s departure on Thursday comes as Nvidia’s most prominent African partner, the Zimbabwean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa’s Cassava Technologies, is trying to turn a GPU cluster in Cape Town into a business spanning five countries. The US chipmaker supplies the processors and owns a stake in Cassava, giving it a financial interest in whether African companies will pay for computing power closer to home.
Cassava is the first test
Nvidia became both a supplier to and a shareholder in Cassava Technologies, the artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure group founded by Zimbabwean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa. Cassava disclosed the equity investment in October 2025 without disclosing the size.
