Compute is now industrial infrastructure. Where clusters are sited, who finances them, what energy powers them, which datasets they are trained on and which institutions govern their outputs will shape African economies for decades. Those decisions are currently made in fragments — by individual ministries, single operators, isolated research groups and external partners negotiating one country at a time.

Over two days in Abuja, BUILD assembles those fragments into a shared agenda. Research sessions put evidence on the table. Policy dialogues turn it into instruments. High-level forums align ministries, financiers and operators. The Innovation Expo shows what already works when African teams get access to serious compute.

The conference is deliberately multi-audience: a researcher submitting an abstract, an investor sizing a data centre, a founder seeking GPU access and a regulator drafting standards all belong in the same room, because none of their problems resolve separately.