Artificial intelligence is creating a new race for digital infrastructure, but Schneider Electric, an energy management and industrial automation company, believes Africa is preparing for it with the wrong question.
Most governments are focused on generating more electricity. Ifeanyi Odoh, Schneider Electric’s East Africa president, says that’s no longer enough. The bigger challenge is rebuilding electricity grids designed for the last century to support AI data centres, cloud computing, electric vehicles and distributed renewable energy.
“The traditional grid as we know it is already becoming obsolete,” Odoh told TechCabal in an interview. “We need grids that are digitally enabled from the start because the way electricity is generated and consumed has fundamentally changed.”
His argument comes as Africa tries to position itself for the AI economy despite having just 360 megawatts of live data centre capacity across 217 facilities in 33 countries—less than 1% of global capacity. Every new AI model, hyperscale data centre and cloud region will demand exponentially more electricity than the infrastructure many African countries were built to deliver.
For Schneider Electric, that makes the electricity grid the next competitive battleground.
