Cassava AI Factory

Operated by Cassava Technologies at Africa Data Centres CPT1 .

Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.

Measured performance

Rmax: 77.79 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 102.2 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 76.1%
Cores: 285,696
Power: -
Per watt: - GF/W

Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.

What this machine is made of

One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.

Role	Part	Supplier at build	Quantity	Confidence	Source
Integrator	- HPE Cray XD670	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	top500.org
Accelerator	NVIDIA H200 SXM Accelerators CUDA (Hopper GH100) · 16,896C · 1.98 GHz · TSMC 4N · 700 W NVIDIA H200 SXM5 141GB	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org
CPU	Intel Xeon Platinum 8558 CPUs x86-64 · 48C · 2.1 GHz · Intel 7 Xeon Platinum 8558 48C 2.1GHz	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org
Interconnect	NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR (Quantum-2) Interconnect Fat tree or dragonfly+ · 400 Gb/s per port · Under 0.6 microseconds Infiniband NDR	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org

AI datacenter metrics

Figures beyond an accelerator count, each with who stated it. What can and cannot be compared across AI datacenters.

Metric	Value	As of	Basis	Note	Source
Accelerators	12,000 accelerators	2025-11	Operator stated	Founder says Cassava acquired 12,000 NVIDIA GPUs for sites in five countries; shipments landed in Cape Town. Per-site split not stated, so this is programme-wide.	connectingafrica.com

The read

The only system in this dataset on the African continent. Cassava originally targeted a mid-2025 go-live; independent reporting as late as May 2026 described the Cape Town site as still preparing to go live, and its only TOP500 appearance is the June 2026 list, so the original target should be read as missed and superseded rather than met. Exact hardware configuration is confirmed only by TOP500 itself, not by Cassava's own public statements.

Timeline

2025-03 Announced source
2026-06 List debut at #36 (June 2026) source
2026-06 First operational source

Public list appearances

Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.

#36: TOP500, June 2026 →

Site & facility

Africa Data Centres CPT1

Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Commissioned: 2026

itweb.co.za

Change history

2026-10-04 Added AI datacenter metrics for cassava-ai-factory

Source check

We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.

Cited source	Result	Found on the page
top500.org	names system and part	NVIDIA H200 SXM, Intel Xeon Platinum 8558, NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR (Quantum-2)
itweb.co.za	names system only	-

Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.