Vodacom Announces Multi-Year Strategic Collaboration with Google Cloud to Boost Africa's AI Advancement

Vodacom Group, a leading pan-African telecommunications and technology company, today announced a strategic collaboration with Google Cloud to accelerate its digital transformation using Google Cloud's advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) product portfolio. The collaboration will enhance Vodacom core solutions and establish a powerful platform for creating new, disruptive products and services specifically tailored for the African market.

Under the terms of the collaboration, Vodacom will harness the capabilities of Google Cloud's secure, scalable infrastructure to unify its vast data assets – and then apply generative AI models, including Gemini, Veo, and Imagen, across its business. This will result in improved operational efficiencies for Vodacom and also deliver new AI-powered services for African consumers.

"This collaboration is more than a technology upgrade; it is a deep commitment to Africa's digital revolution," said Shameel Joosub, CEO of Vodacom. "Integrating Google Cloud's data and AI solutions into our business will modernise our infrastructure and fundamentally shift our operational paradigm. This collaboration is essential for us to build and deploy solutions that address the unique challenges and opportunities of the continent, ensuring the transformative power of AI is accessible to millions of customers and businesses across Africa."

Maureen Costello, Vice President, UKI and SSA, Google Cloud said, "Google Cloud is proud to support Vodacom in accelerating AI across Africa. By providing access to our most advanced generative AI models from Gemini and our leading data infrastructure, we are supporting Vodacom's ambitious vision to build technology solutions that improve the lives of Africans."

The primary goals of the collaboration are centered on three strategic pillars:

• Data modernisation and unification: Vodacom will migrate and unify its critical data platforms onto Google Cloud's data cloud, including BigQuery. This enables Vodacom to achieve real-time insights, enhanced data governance, and a single, secure source of truth for business decisions. This foundation is essential for deploying large-scale AI models.
• Accelerated AI adoption in Africa: Vodacom will harness Google Cloud's AI capabilities, like Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform and Google's Gemini models, to rapidly integrate intelligent services into its offerings. This includes optimising network performance, enhancing customer service with AI-powered personalised care, and combating fraud through advanced machine learning models – effectively bringing powerful AI capabilities closer to African consumers.
• Product innovation for the future: By using Google Cloud's AI capabilities, Vodacom will focus on developing cutting-edge solutions for the African market. Initial focus areas include creating new fintech services for greater financial inclusion, developing enterprise solutions, and designing consumer experiences to improve content accessibility and education.

The collaboration announced today builds on the existing strategic relationship between Vodacom Group's parent company, Vodafone, and Google Cloud, demonstrating a commitment to scaling digital innovation and providing enterprise-grade security and reliability across all markets.

About Vodacom Group

Vodacom Group is a leading pan-African technology company with over 223.2 million customers, including Safaricom and 93.7 million financial services users. From our roots in South Africa, we have grown our business to include operations in the DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, and Tanzania. As the continent's largest facilitator of mobile money transactions, Vodacom processes $460 billion in value annually and is majority-owned by Vodafone.

About Google Cloud

Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimized AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organizations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.