By Pascal Oparada
Social Media/Tech Reporter
Microsoft Corporation has concluded plans to spend more than $100 million over the next five years to open its first development Centre in Africa to work with local partners, governments, and also hire engineering talents.
The sites would be in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital and Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub.
The tech giant plans to hire full-time developers at the two sites by the end of 2019 and expand to 500 by the end of 2023, Microsoft said in a statement published by Bloomberg.
The company plans to use the sites to recruitAfrican engineers to work in areas such as cloud services, which use artificial intelligence and applications for mixed reality – where customers use goggles to project 3-D images onto the real world.
Cloud tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Huawei are jostling for the African market and plans to take advantage of growing telecommunications infrastructure and work in areas like e-commerce and mobile payments.
Microsoft has been partnering with and looking for cloud customers in Africa where it opened data centers in South Africa.
The company said it is working with Nigerian and Kenyan companies in areas like fintech, energy, and agriculture.
Cloud rival, Amazon, is also opening a data center in Africa next year.
