The Glass Bakery
Designing more efficient chips for Africa’s AI systems.
We have been laying the physical and financial groundwork for a sovereign compute ecosystem, with over 1 GW on the horizon. This early phase has been all about capacity—hundreds of megawatts of GPU infrastructure, modular deployments, data-center alliances, continental datasets and the software to orchestrate it all. That foundation is solid now. Which means it’s time to move one layer deeper.
Glass Bakery is the newest initiative within our broader ecosystem — a long-term program to explore how chips can be designed and eventually produced in Africa for the workloads that matter most to our continent.
Why Design Chips?
Every conversation about AI and compute eventually meets the same bottleneck: chips. The world’s supply of high-performance processors is limited and concentrated in a few regions. This scarcity affects everyone — universities, startups, even governments — and makes scaling expensive and unpredictable.
Africa already faces unique conditions: higher energy costs, hotter climates, and rapidly growing data needs. Our servers run in different environments than those in the Americas, Northern Europe or East Asia. That means the next generation of hardware must be designed with our realities in mind — power efficiency, durability, and cost optimization for regional data centers.
The Glass Bakery
The Glass Bakery begins as a research and design initiative to study those needs and prototype solutions. The goal is not to compete with global giants, but to learn, experiment, and build the foundation for a home-grown silicon design culture.
In its first phase, Glass Bakery will focus on three streams of work:
Learning and Design Research
Building small research groups and collaborations that study chip architectures, open-hardware design tools, and ways to make existing processors run more efficiently in African environments.Prototyping and Partnerships
Working with global fabrication partners to prototype simple, low-power chips — controllers, accelerators, and energy-management components — that can eventually be integrated into local compute systems.Talent and Knowledge Development
Partnering with universities and independent engineers to grow a community of African semiconductor researchers and designers. Over time, this will create the human base needed for a sustainable industry.
Each step builds toward a long-term goal: enabling local capability in chip design and fabrication. This is a gradual process measured in years, not months, but it starts by planting the right seeds today.
The Glass Bakery is part of the same vision that drives Africa Compute Fund: to create the full stack of infrastructure for AI in Africa — energy, compute, and intelligence. Adding a research program in silicon design completes that picture.
While ACF continues to scale GPU infrastructure across multiple regions, Glass Bakery will explore the hardware beneath it. In time, the two efforts will inform each other: lessons from running large-scale compute in African conditions will shape how new chips are designed, and future chips will make that compute even more efficient.
Looking Ahead
Success for Glass Bakery isn’t about building a massive foundry overnight. It’s about creating capability — the people, knowledge, and design processes that make local production possible later. If we can train engineers, produce early prototypes with international partners, and show that Africa can design technology tuned to its own needs, we’ll have achieved a historic milestone.
The Glass Bakery represents the beginning of a long journey. It will take collaboration, patience, and shared belief that Africa can and should participate fully in the semiconductor era. Over time, we expect this initiative to evolve into partnerships with universities, research institutes, fabrication facilities, and private companies across the continent and beyond.
The world’s demand for compute will only grow. By starting this work now and designing our own silicon, the continent secures a seat at the table of technological creation.
