South African organisations are shifting AI workloads out of the public cloud faster than their counterparts anywhere else in the world, according to new global research commissioned by Cloudera.
The Great AI Re-Architecture Survey, conducted by Wakefield Research among 1 500 enterprise architects, cloud infrastructure leads and data architects across nine markets, found that 83% of South African organisations have already moved at least some AI workloads from public cloud to private cloud or on-premises environments – the highest figure recorded anywhere in the study:
- South Africa: 83%
- Americas (regional average): 73%
- Global average: 66%
- APAC (regional average): 63% (Singapore 43%, India 68%)
- EMEA (regional average): 55% (UK 45%, Spain 49%)
South Africa outpaces even the Americas, the strongest-performing region overall, by 10 percentage points.
Additionally, this shift comes alongside a broader hybrid push. Asked how they plan to build AI infrastructure over the next two years, more South African respondents pointed to a hybrid-first approach (31%) than to any other single strategy, ahead of increased cloud spend (28%), greater on-premises investment (26%) or edge investment (15%).
“Cost, data sovereignty and regulatory exposure are pulling South African AI workloads out of the public cloud faster than anywhere else we surveyed,” says Warren Olivier, regional vice-president for Africa at Cloudera.
“Organisations want infrastructure they can see and control. Increasingly, that means going hybrid – letting workloads sit on-premises, in private cloud or in public cloud, wherever cost, performance and compliance say they belong.”