South Africa has committed $18.2 million in the 2026/2027 financial year to replace its decade-old Lengau supercomputer, which was disrupted by cyberattacks earlier this year, with a new 4 petaflop system that is roughly three times more powerful.

Minister of Science Blade Nzimande confirmed the allocation in a response to a parliamentary question from Umkhonto Wesizwe party MP Thembinkosi Mjadu. The transition will be overseen by the National Integrated Cyberinfrastructure System (NICIS), the national programme that also includes the South African National Research Network (SANReN) and the Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa (DIRISA), with the budget split across technology, infrastructure, human resources, research and operations. Lengau itself runs at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town.

Describing Lengau as a “legacy environment,” Nzimande said replacing it was necessary to reduce the country’s reliance on ageing infrastructure. The transition is being carried out in phases to ensure continuity of national research computing services while the new platform is commissioned and tested.

“Phase one is expected to be live by the end of November 2026, and the completed system upgrade is expected by the end of March 2027,” Nzimande said.

Beyond the current financial year, the CSIR has been notified of a R342 million ($21.4 million) budget for 2027/2028 and R349 million ($21.8 million) for 2028/2029. Nzimande noted that these figures remain indicative and will be reconfirmed through annual allocation letters.

Lengau has been the backbone of South Africa’s scientific computing infrastructure since it debuted on the Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers in June 2016, entering the ranking at number 121. At the time, it was the most powerful supercomputer on the African continent — a title it has since ceded on the Top 500 to Morocco’s Toubkal system, which now ranks as Africa’s fastest publicly listed machine.

Named after the Setswana word for “Cheetah,” Lengau replaced the Tsessebe system and was 15 times faster than its predecessor at launch, with a theoretical peak of 1.3 petaflops. Over the past decade, it has supported researchers across Africa in weather and seismic modelling, drug discovery, fluid dynamics and artificial intelligence, as well as research associated with the Square Kilometre Array Observatory and MeerKAT, the radio telescope array in the Northern Cape that underpins South Africa’s role as co-host, alongside Australia, of the international SKA project.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the machine processed data from SARS-CoV-2 gene sequencing and supported genomic analysis that informed the country’s scientific response.

The decision to replace Lengau was accelerated by events earlier this year, when a threat actor gained access to the system and deployed cryptocurrency mining malware, exploiting its computing power for financial gain. Users first noticed performance problems in May. Despite an initial shutdown and a full re-imaging of all nodes, a second attack followed shortly afterwards, forcing the system offline for several weeks before it returned to service in July. Hijacked research clusters are a recurring problem internationally: supercomputing centres elsewhere have repeatedly documented cryptocurrency-mining intrusions, since a single compromised node offers far more processing power than an ordinary desktop.

Nzimande acknowledged that the renewal of ageing core infrastructure had lagged, and that replacing the system was now necessary to maintain South Africa’s scientific competitiveness.

“The transition risk is being mitigated through a combination of service-continuity measures, phased modernisation, improved utilisation management, and strengthened maintenance of existing systems,” he said.

Cybersecurity hardening, partnerships with research infrastructure providers, and planning for next-generation compute capacity are all part of the transition. For a continent where scientific ambitions are expanding as quickly as its digital infrastructure, the investment represents more than a hardware refresh, signalling South Africa’s intent to keep its most powerful scientific tool from falling behind.