How Cassava Designs Resilient Connectivity For AI Workloads Across Africa with Senior VP Marco Gagiano
Tech Talk AfricaPlay episode
Show notes
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International Telecoms Week x Datacloud Africa 2026 Conference Podcast Edition
Senior Vice President of Connectivity, Cloud & Cyber Security, Marco Gagiano - Cassava Technologies
A single cable break shouldn’t be able to knock whole regions offline, yet Africa’s digital infrastructure still has chokepoints that turn routine failures into major outages. From the show floor at ITW 2026, we sit down with Marco Cargiano of Cassava Technologies to get specific about what “resilient connectivity” actually means when AI infrastructure, cloud services, and enterprise demand are accelerating across the continent.
We talk through how Cassava approaches redundancy across submarine capacity and terrestrial fiber, why a high-capacity mesh network matters, and how traffic should reroute instantly when a link fails. Marco explains why AI changes the game for network planning because it’s not just more traffic, it’s different traffic: far more upload-heavy flows that can fill capacity faster than legacy assumptions. If you care about Africa connectivity, network engineering, and the practical realities of scaling data centers and AI factories, this conversation is packed with real-world constraints and design choices.
Then we tackle a topic that gets oversimplified: data sovereignty. We explore the difference between geographic sovereignty (processing and storing data inside a country) and “sovereignty without geography,” where encryption and modern network tech can let customers use cross-border compute without data being stored elsewhere. We also break down cross-border failover for landlocked countries, the danger of “paper redundancy,” and where LEO satellite fits as a complementary option for rural coverage and emergency gaps rather than a true fiber replacement.
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Credits
Host:
Stella GichuhiProducer:
James NjorogeExecutive Producers:
Harry HareAgutu Dan
