Microsoft has shared their plans to construct development centres at a cost of more than 100 million in the next half-decade. The development centres in Africa are supposed to work with Microsoft’s local partners and government. Microsoft also hopes to hire engineers from these centres.
The initial sites for the development centres will be in Kenya and Nigeria and Microsoft intends to hire 100 full-time developers at the two sites by the end of this year and expand to 500 by the end of 2023.
The engineers Microsoft is looking to hire at the centres will work in fields such as Cloud Services, AI and applications for mixed reality.
The plan to work with the governments appears to be something to help Microsoft grow their footprint in Africa and supplying the multiple departments of government will definitely give them significant revenues in the long-run.
Microsoft is not the only company pushing cloud services on the African markets. Amazon and Huawei are also making some progress on penetrating the African continent and it will be interesting to see which company ends up winning the cloud wars in Africa.
