MTN Group plans to convert its African tower estate into a distributed AI compute fabric, installing open GPU infrastructure at base-station sites so that the same hardware can run both the cellular network and edge AI inference workloads.
The plan was set out by MTN Group chief technology and information officer Charles Molapisi at an event hosted by law firm Bowmans in Johannesburg on Wednesday. It was MTN’s most detailed explanation yet of how it plans to position itself as the infrastructure layer of Africa’s AI economy.
Today every cellular tower has a baseband unit at its base – a piece of single-purpose hardware that exists only to drive the radio access network. Molapisi said MTN will replace these with open GPU configurations capable of running the radio plus AI inference, or what the company has described as a “distributed AI grid”.
A pay-off, he argued, is latency. AI workloads that today have to be hauled back to a central data centre could be processed at or near the tower instead. He gave the example of children playing PlayStation on an estate served by a tower in the estate: with edge compute installed, the workload could be served locally rather than backhauled to a distant data centre and returned, freeing capacity and cutting round-trip time.
The edge layer sits alongside the centralised half of MTN’s AI infrastructure plan. The group confirmed in its 2025 financial results in March that it will build two new AI-enabled data centres, one in South Africa and one in Nigeria.
Edge AI grid
Molapisi described an MTN AI strategy that spans a relatively full stack – procuring silicon, building data centres, running its own cloud platforms, curating models and co-developing applications with partners. The company is also building terrestrial fibre across multiple African markets, including some where it has no GSM licence, to plug what Molapisi called the continent’s missing “rails”.
The investments sit inside MTN’s Ambition 2030 strategy, which reorganised the group around three platforms – connectivity, fintech and digital infrastructure. The tower-to-inference push is the most concrete articulation yet of a thesis MTN has been laying out for more than a year, including an investment in March in US AI-native networking start-up ORAN Development Company alongside Nvidia, Cisco, Nokia, AT&T and Telecom Italia. At the time, MTN Digital Infrastructure CEO Mazen Mroué described the move around “sovereign AI” – the principle that African countries should host AI compute locally rather than relying on offshore infrastructure.
Molapisi said MTN is working on the edge AI grid alongside technology partners. The ambition, he said, is for MTN to become “the biggest distributor of edge inference in the continent”.
The strategic case rests on Molapisi’s wider argument that Africa risks repeating its commodity history in the AI era. With about 1% of global computing power on the continent today, he said, Africa stands to “export raw data” the way it has long exported raw minerals, only to import the intelligence built from it at a premium.
Molapisi conceded in his presentation on Wednesday that chip generations are turning over fast enough – Nvidia’s Hopper to Blackwell inside two years, for example – that procurement decisions made today can be obsolete by deployment. He said MTN is being deliberate about its chip mix and the balance between training and inference silicon, “because if you get that wrong, you’ll get the economics terribly wrong”. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
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