AI is now a geopolitical asset. African presidents are racing to catch up.

When African leaders gathered in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, on May 12 for the Africa Forward Summit, artificial intelligence (AI) took centre stage, alongside energy, agriculture and international finance for the first time. That alone marked a change.

Only a few years ago, AI policy on the continent revolved around ethics, digital literacy and startup incubation. Now governments are discussing cloud infrastructure, sovereign data, regional computing capacity and local language models, subjects once confined to engineers and Silicon Valley executives.

In the past two years, Kenya has unveiled a National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, Nigeria has launched its National AI Strategy, Rwanda has established a Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution to shape AI governance, South Africa has stepped up work on a national AI policy, while the African Union adopted its Continental AI Strategy calling for African-owned data, compute infrastructure and language models. 

The shift reflects a growing recognition that artificial intelligence is becoming a geopolitical asset. Just as countries once competed over natural resources and shipping lanes, they are now competing over semiconductors, data centres and computing power. 

But Africa enters that race from an uncomfortable position.

Critical minerals

The continent produces many of the minerals that power modern computing and generates some of the world’s fastest-growing volumes of digital data through mobile money, e-commerce and government digitisation. Yet the infrastructure that turns those inputs into economic value largely sits elsewhere.

That dependence appears to have informed Section 6 of the Africa Forward Declaration, adopted by African and French leaders in Nairobi. The declaration, signed by 30 heads of state, documents calls for investment in data centres, cloud computing, trusted data systems, broadband infrastructure, and African-led ownership of data and AI systems. 

“Digital transformation and artificial intelligence are reshaping economies, public services, knowledge systems, security, creative industries, and global competitiveness,” said the declaration, “Africa’s participation in the AI age requires investment across the full digital and AI stack.”

Despite accounting for nearly 20% of the world’s population and some of its fastest-growing internet markets, the continent still hosts less than 1% of global data-centre capacity, according to industry estimates. 

Mobile data consumption is growing at roughly 40% annually—almost twice the global average—but the infrastructure needed to process and store that information remains severely constrained.

A decade ago, African startups could build globally competitive products using rented cloud services and relatively modest computing resources. Generative AI has changed the economics entirely. Training and deploying frontier models requires thousands of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), sophisticated cooling systems, and uninterrupted electricity supplies.

African governments’ investment in AI infrastructure is still low, with most commitments coming from the private sector and development finance institutions (DFIs). 

In April, the International Finance Corporation committed $100 million to regional data-centre operator Raxio Group, its largest investment in African digital infrastructure, backing facilities from Ethiopia to Angola as demand for cloud services and AI workloads accelerates. The World Bank’s investment reflects a growing recognition that digital infrastructure has become as important to economic development as roads and ports.

Private investments

Cassava Technologies, founded by Zimbabwean telecoms billionaire Strive Masiyiwa, announced in July 2025 plans to deploy Nvidia-powered AI infrastructure across Africa through a $700 million investment programme, positioning itself as one of the continent’s first large-scale AI compute providers.

In 2024, Microsoft and Abu Dhabi-based AI company G42 unveiled an ambitious $1 billion AI data centre in Kenya, powered by geothermal energy. The project has since been put on hold. 

Some of these investments, like the Kenyan one, illustrate the continent’s infrastructure constraints.

Negotiations have stalled over electricity requirements and financing arrangements, with Kenyan officials acknowledging that the original proposal would require more power capacity than the country can currently dedicate to a single data centre. Discussions continue, but they show that computing power requires supporting infrastructure, which the continent currently struggles to provide.

It is forcing policymakers to rethink AI as much an infrastructure question as a technology one. The Nairobi Declaration referred to this, shifting debates on AI investments to the centre of the continent’s economic policy.

“We commit to mobilise public and private investment in resilient digital infrastructure and AI infrastructure, including broadband connectivity, regional data centres, cloud and compute capacity, clean energy and trusted data systems,” African heads of state declared.

The implications stretch far beyond data centres. For much of the past decade, Africa’s digital ambitions have been defined by rising smartphone adoption, the spread of fintech, and the emergence of startup hubs from Lagos and Nairobi to Cape Town. Artificial intelligence is changing that conversation. 

The focus is shifting away from consumer applications and towards the infrastructure that enables them.

The same shift is taking place around the world. In the US, AI leadership has become intertwined with national security, with the Trump administration accelerating investment in AI infrastructure and treating advanced AI capabilities as a strategic asset in geopolitical competition with China. 

Washington has issued executive orders to accelerate data centre construction and strengthen America’s AI technology stack, while officials have described AI as critical to maintaining economic and military leadership.

Gulf states are deploying sovereign wealth to finance hyperscale data centres and semiconductor partnerships. Europe, meanwhile, increasingly frames AI through the lens of technological sovereignty rather than simply innovation policy.

Africa is beginning to adopt a similar approach. The Nairobi declaration repeatedly emphasises digital sovereignty, African ownership of data and the development of local AI ecosystems. 

It also calls for African language models, locally generated datasets and open-weight AI systems, reflecting a growing recognition among policymakers that AI is not just another software industry but a strategic asset that could shape future economic growth.

Technological sovereignty comes with a substantial price tag, which the continent might not marshal soon. Building a competitive AI ecosystem requires far more than skilled engineers. 

It depends on reliable electricity, fibre networks, advanced chips, research capacity and billions of dollars in patient capital. For many African governments already facing fiscal constraints and competing development priorities, those investments remain difficult to finance.

But the declaration’s call for co-investment between African and French institutions suggests Africa is unlikely to build sovereign AI infrastructure on its own. The scale of investment required is simply too great. 

Instead, governments appear to be pursuing a hybrid strategy, seeking foreign capital while retaining greater control over data, computing capacity and intellectual property. Whether that balance can be maintained remains an open question.