AI in Africa

Paul Mozur, Adam Satariano, and Aaron Krolik, China’s A.I. Is Surging Across Africa. That Should Worry Silicon Valley. NYTimes, Aug. 5, 2026.

When Ernest Mwebaze, a tech developer in Uganda, was building an artificial intelligence system last year tailored for his country’s many languages, he tested American and Chinese tools to see which one could help.

China’s won.

The A.I. model from the Chinese internet giant Alibaba handled Uganda’s dozens of languages better than anything from Meta or Google, Mr. Mwebaze said. It was also inexpensive, and he could customize the model with his own data.

“We want to build things as cheap as possible, yet have them work really well,” said Mr. Mwebaze, a former research scientist at Google. His system, called Sunflower, is now used across Uganda, including by farmers to receive weather information and crop advice in local dialects.

Mr. Mwebaze, 47, is one of thousands of developers across Africa who have turned to Chinese A.I. models in the past year. In Kenya, entrepreneurs are using the models to streamline legal and business services. In Nigeria, they have made educational tools that teach high school students. In Ghana, developers are building local chatbots.

China’s A.I. is surging, especially in developing countries, as people look for the best possible system at the lowest possible cost. Unlike models made by the leading American A.I. companies OpenAI and Anthropic — which are closed and charge fees — the Chinese systems are publicly available to download and modify without payment or approval.

Chinese softpower:

Xi Jinping, China’s leader, is using A.I. as a form of soft power. At a July conference in Shanghai, he cast Chinese models as more reliable and cheaper and warned that A.I.’s benefits must be shared or they would create “new historical injustices.” Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa and seven other African countries signed an A.I. pact with China at the event to promote international cooperation.

Chinese firms are also courting African developers with free computing and hands-on engineering help, developers said. Many Chinese-made smartphones in Africa come with Chinese A.I. tools preinstalled.

At the same time, China’s A.I. industry faces challenges. Companies have struggled to make money from their users and face security questions about data and links to Beijing. Many African developers still pay for American A.I. models, especially for technical tasks like coding.

Yet Africa’s experience shows the global A.I. competition is now a two-horse race.

China in Kenya's "Silicon Valley";

Konza Technopolis, a planned city, was announced 18 years ago as Kenya’s answer to Silicon Valley. Hopefully branded the Silicon Savannah, it is now a grid of empty boulevards and skeletal buildings, watched over by a powerful Chinese surveillance system.

It would look like a failed experiment but for one slate-gray building behind an electric fence. Financed by Chinese loans and built by Huawei, the site is a data center that runs computing for Kenya’s government.

For two decades, Chinese firms have wired Africa’s telecommunications networks and paved its roads. M-Pesa, Kenya’s celebrated mobile-money system, runs on Huawei technology.

These tech ties gave China a foothold in the continent, which it is using to sell A.I. One project advertised at Konza will use technology from the Chinese A.I. firm DeepSeek to combat telecom fraud.

Meanwhile, the American environment is risky:

In a Nairobi high-rise in June, a top Kenyan civil servant for technology said he was surprised when Anthropic pulled access to Fable, its powerful model, at the Trump administration’s behest.

It was a “wake up call” to the world, said John Tanui, the principal secretary in Kenya’s Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy. The abrupt move was a warning that relying on U.S. models could pose risks, he said.

Still, America remains in the game:

For all of China’s momentum, much of the A.I. money in Kenya still flows to U.S. companies.

Everyday users are on U.S. systems like ChatGPT and Claude. One 2025 survey found that 42 percent of Kenya’s 23 million internet users had used ChatGPT in the previous month, among the highest rate in the world.

Even Chinese models earn Americans money. Kenyan companies often run Chinese open-source models on cloud services from Amazon and Microsoft, so the U.S. giants make money from their data centers that deliver the technology to customers.

There's more at the link.

Note: I've been watching Africa ever since I learned that Nollywood was the 3rd largest film industry in the world by number of titles (after Hollywood and Bollywood). Africa pretty much leap-frogged over analog cinema direct to digital. Now, of course, they don't have to develop and manufacture the digital video equipment to produce films, they just have to use it. But they do have to service and maintain it. Things are a bit different with AI. But with Chinese open-weight models, who knows?