Cassava and Microsoft bring Azure ExpressRoute Metro to Johannesburg

Azure ExpressRoute Metro arriving in Johannesburg is a quiet but meaningful upgrade to Africa’s AI infrastructure. By adding a second, redundant peering location and wrapping it in a managed Secure CloudConnect service, Cassava and Microsoft are making it easier for African banks, telcos and governments to run latency-sensitive and regulated AI workloads on Azure without hair-pinning traffic through Europe. That reduces both technical risk and political friction around data residency.

In the AGI race, more resilient cloud on-ramps in the global South matter because they expand where serious AI workloads can live. If only North American and European metros have first-class connectivity, that’s where the most capable models will concentrate and where the surrounding ecosystems of talent and startups form. Moves like this help ensure that as models get more powerful, African enterprises are not relegated to thin, API-only consumption but can build their own higher-trust, lower-latency applications on regional infrastructure.