With diesel costs rising sharply amid the conflict in the Middle East, one Zimbabwean company has turned to artificial intelligence to cut its fuel bill.
Econet InfraCo, the tower operator subsidiary of Econet Wireless Zimbabwe, has become the first tower operator in the world to deploy an AI-powered solution to manage diesel consumption.
The company developed AI Fuel Mode in collaboration with sister company Cassava Compute, which operates Africa’s only NVIDIA AI supercomputer, based in Cape Town, South Africa. Mobile operators across Africa rely on more than 500,000 diesel generators to keep their networks running amid unreliable electricity supplies. Diesel is therefore one of the largest operating costs for tower infrastructure companies.
Econet InfraCo worked with Cassava Compute to analyse how and when individual generators are used, developing an AI-powered fuel management matrix that has cut diesel costs by 30%. Cassava AI says the platform will be made available to other operators, with potential applications in industries such as mining and manufacturing.
The AI Fuel Mode solution comes as Cassava AI, working with NVIDIA, begins deploying AI Energy Mode, a similar platform designed to help Econet Wireless optimise its electricity consumption. Both platforms are also expected to create additional demand for Cassava’s GPU infrastructure.
