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By Nqobile Dludla
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) -Microsoft will invest an additional 5.4 billion rand ($296.81 million) by the end of 2027 to expand its cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure in South Africa to meet the growing demand for the company's Azure services in the region.
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said at an event in Johannesburg on Thursday that the world's biggest software maker would pay for technical certification exams for 50,000 individuals in high-demand digital skills.
The certification will be for cloud architecture, AI and cybersecurity, he added.
Microsoft has already spent 20.4 billion rand to set up South Africa's first enterprise-grade data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town. The country has become a major hub for data centres to handle the high computational demands of AI as companies seek to integrate the technology into various products and services.
Microsoft plans to invest about $80 billion globally in fiscal 2025 on developing data centres to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications.
($1 = 18.1936 rand)
(Reporting by Nqobile Dludla; Writing by Tannur Anders; Editing by Alexander Winning and Richard Chang)