- Essays··8 min read
The Foundry Up the Coast From Africa's GPU Racks
Africa's October GPU announcements — World Bank shared compute, Cassava's Nemotron inference, a 400-GPU South African private cloud — are built for enterprise and government buyers. Fifty kilometres away, a foundry has since 2017 turned RFID-tagged casting data into measurable scrap reductions on CPUs. The integration layer between plant-floor sensors and rack infrastructure is what manufacturing actually needs; nothing published this month sells it.
africa-ai-infrastructureindustrial-machine-learninggpu-computemanufacturingRead - Essays··8 min read
Twelve Thousand at Shoprite, No Baseline Underneath
Shoprite runs generative-AI tools across 12,000 employees — 6.9% of its 174,000-person workforce — through a proprietary routing gateway that dispatches each request to the least expensive capable model. The group has not published a pre-deployment baseline, a cycle-time figure, or a per-engineer throughput measure against which the programme can be audited. METR's second-round productivity data shows why that gap matters: the counterfactual is disappearing faster than the measurement apparatus can catch it.
enterprise-airetail-aiworkforce-productivityai-measurementRead