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"World class digital infrastructure should not be oceans away– Global economic growth will be fueled by Energy, Compute (GPUs), and Digital Infrastructure (Data Centers & connectivity). Our goal for Africa is to ensure world-class digital infrastructure is accessible locally."
Horus Labs is building Africa's next-generation digital backbone through modular, renewable-powered edge data centers tailored for AI and sovereign cloud applications. Founded in 2022 by Raymond U. Ononiwu, an engineer and former Microsoft veteran, alongside co-founders Ludovic Bernad (COO) and Dennis (Chief of Staff), Horus Labs is tackling one of Africa's most pressing challenges: the absence of localized, sustainable compute infrastructure. Headquartered in Kigali, Horus Labs occupies a critical market position that is too technical for traditional colocation players yet too specialized for hyperscalers. The company transforms empty colocation facilities into what Raymond describes as a "fully-furnished hotel" for African AI, delivering end-to-end GPU compute that stays on the continent. Partnering with Schneider Electric as the principal design and delivery partner, along with Control Plane Corporation, the company integrates prefabricated, liquid-cooled Tier III-ready modular data centers built specifically for African climates. The infrastructure includes a self-serve cloud portal and API that enables customers to spin up GPUs locally through bare-metal, VMs, Kubernetes, and GPU-as-a-service options with pay-per-hour billing. Crucially, Horus has integrated local mobile-money and banking rails through PawaPay, unlocking access for the 80% of users without international cards and eliminating USD payment frictions. The company has secured financial letters of support for up to US$55 million on a phased basis, with the first phase of approximately US$19 million. Its flagship 1MW facility in Kigali, Rwanda, is scheduled for construction and commissioning around Q3-Q4 2026, featuring a 256-GPU inference cluster as a Year-1 milestone. The facility will scale to 8MW by 2029, with expansion plans across nine countries including Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria. Beyond infrastructure, Horus Labs deploys forward-deployed AI engineers for co-development engagements with governments, banks, and SMEs, turning national health systems, local call centers, and satellite agriculture data into production AI models. This approach delivers operational outcomes, not just infrastructure, unlocking sovereign use cases across agriculture, energy, health, and education where data and workloads remain in Africa for compliance, lower latency, and local control. Selected for both the AI Hub's Infrastructure Builder and Compute Ready tracks, Horus Labs will scale its foundational infrastructure while optimizing AI solutions that demonstrate local compute's transformative power, proving that Africa's infrastructure builders can simultaneously be its most innovative users, creating a self-reinforcing ecosystem where building and deploying AI strengthen each other.
