Newly rebranded TrendAI will use South Africa as a launchpad for wider African growth, doubling local investment this year while expanding in-country data centre capacity and repositioning its business around AI security.
Speaking at the company’s launch event in Cape Town last week, Assad Arabi, regional MD for Africa, said SA had become a priority market.
“Our investment is going to double this year and double [again] next year,” said Arabi.
He said the company’s first-quarter performance had strengthened confidence in the local market. “In Q1 alone, we managed to grow 80% year on year.”
The company’s March 2026 rebrand from Trend Micro to TrendAI reflects a strategic shift towards AI-driven cyber security, governance and risk management.
TrendAI also announced expanded South African data centre capabilities, aimed at customers requiring local hosting, compliance controls and stronger governance over sensitive workloads. Arabi said the next phase of upgrades was already in progress.
“We are moving to the second phase of the data centre, where we are enhancing its capabilities,” he said.
The company did not disclose the investment value, facility location or when the expanded capacity would be fully operational.
Gareth Redelinghuys, country MD for sub-Saharan Africa, said the South African deployment would serve as the first phase of a wider African expansion strategy.
“Our continued investment includes the delivery of a true locally governed data centre, with its own data lake in South Africa,” said Redelinghuys.
He added that the company planned to expand its footprint through additional local deployments in other African markets.
Security teams under pressure
Arabi said cyber criminals were already using AI to improve attacks, forcing vendors to move faster.
“The attackers started to rely on it. They were even faster than security vendors in adopting it,” he said.
He noted that the company was shifting from reactive security models towards earlier threat prediction. “We are planning to stay ahead of the attacks by moving from detection to prediction.”
Visibility gap inside companies
Bilal Baig, VP of AMEA solution engineering, said many organisations still lacked visibility into how AI tools were being used internally.
“We don’t know what our employees are using. We don’t know what attacks are there. We don’t know how risky our AI infrastructure is,” said Baig.
He said security teams were also dealing with fragmented monitoring tools, high alert volumes and growing vulnerability backlogs.
“How do you prioritise this? That’s where the key of the agentic SIEM will be – you’re able to prioritise what actions need to be performed on that particular incident,” he said.
Baig said patching every vulnerability equally was no longer practical. “The prioritisation of vulnerabilities becomes critical.”
He said companies should focus first on internet-facing and business-critical systems, while using automation to identify likely attack paths before they are exploited.
Share
