TrendAI expands South African data footprint as AI-driven threats escalate

A global cybersecurity firm is expanding its South African data infrastructure as AI-driven threats reshape enterprise security.

The American-Japanese cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, which recently rebranded its enterprise unit as TrendAI, has announced an expansion of its data centre capabilities in South Africa amid growing demand for local data governance and AI-driven security across Africa.

“By further provisioning our capabilities, we’re ensuring that organisations can innovate confidently, knowing their data remains protected, governed and aligned to national regulatory frameworks,” said Gareth Redelinghuys, country MD of TrendAI Sub-Saharan Africa.

Redelinghuys said the expansion forms part of a broader African rollout, including a locally governed data centre in South Africa with a dedicated data lake.

The wider strategy involves additional in-country deployments across the African continent to build a network of sovereign infrastructure supporting compliance, resilience and regional digital growth.

TrendAI supports more than 25,000 enterprise customers globally, including 70% of Fortune Global 500 companies, and operates in 185 countries with more than 6,000 employees across 75 countries and 14 global research and development centres.

It said South Africa is one of only two emerging markets where it has enhanced local data centre infrastructure, alongside the UAE.

“The enhancement of our investments represents more than infrastructure expansion — it reinforces our commitment to sovereign, secure and scalable digital ecosystems for Africa,” added Redelinghuys, framing the move as part of a longer-term bet on Africa’s digital economy.

Launched towards the end of 2025, TrendAI Vision One, the company’s enterprise platform, is already deployed in South Africa. Via this platform, the company provides integrated cybersecurity across AI, cloud, data, network, endpoint and identity environments, aimed at helping organisations manage risk across increasingly complex digital systems.

The group has also reported strong recent performance, with enterprise annual recurring revenue surpassing $1.3bn (R22bn) and large enterprise platform revenue growing 58% year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2025.

The enterprise business recorded 8% year-on-year net sales growth in the fourth quarter, while large enterprise platform annual recurring revenue reached $467m (R7.6bn), supported by 1,000 new customers added in 2025.

Assad Arabi, regional MD at TrendAI, said South Africa has become a key focus of the company’s investment strategy over the past two years.

“Our investment is going to double this year and will double more next year, because the health of the economy here is getting much better,” Arabi said.

TrendAI recorded 80% year-on-year revenue growth in the first quarter of 2026 across Africa, reflecting what Arabi described as strong returns from its regional strategy.

Arabi said AI is now embedded across both business and security environments but warned that it is also being used by attackers to automate operations, improve attack quality and carry out more complex intrusions without advanced technical skills.

“Immediately, we’ve seen the attackers start to rely on it. Actually, they were even faster than security vendors in adopting AI. And this is going to continue like that,” he said, noting that the rapid rollout of generative AI tools has accelerated this shift.

He said this speed of adoption is reshaping both how cyberattacks are executed and how security companies respond to them.

Beyond traditional AI use cases, Arabi pointed to the emergence of autonomous agentic AI systems as a new area of risk, as organisations deploy software agents capable of taking independent actions across systems.

“We used to think of employees as the weakest link, but now the AI agents are the weakest link in your environment,” he said, adding that TrendAI is developing tools to govern and control how these agents operate and to ensure they remain within defined boundaries.

He warned that the scale of deployment is expected to grow rapidly, with estimates of 1.2-billion AI agents in use within two years, increasing the risk of misuse or unintended behaviour if not properly managed.

Arabi said this shift toward AI-driven threats also reinforces the importance of identifying system vulnerabilities, noting that about 90% to 95% of cyberattacks rely on exploiting weaknesses in software and infrastructure.

“If the vendor understands the vulnerability, is the vendor going to be able to protect you from these vulnerabilities?” he said.

He explained that while TrendAI continues to report vulnerabilities to vendors so they can be patched, the approach is evolving beyond reactive defence. The company is moving toward more proactive protection and increasingly toward prediction, aiming to anticipate and block threats before vulnerabilities are publicly disclosed or exploited.

Arabi said this approach gives customers an average of 96 days of protection before a patch becomes available.