Africa’s four biggest tech economies have each drafted artificial intelligence strategies admitting they depend too heavily on Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Meta for infrastructure — and signalling a desire for more control over the terms of that relationship.
Nigeria, Egypt and Kenya have released draft AI policies since January 2025 that identify dependence on U.S. tech companies as a threat to security and sovereignty. South Africa reached the same conclusion in a draft it published and withdrew in April after the AI tools used to help write it generated fake citations.
Most African nations rely on U.S. companies for computing power, funding and expertise, AI and policy experts who advise these governments told Rest of World. They are now pushing for data sovereignty, local talent and better terms from foreign providers.
“Africa’s push for digital sovereignty cannot mean total independence from global AI supply chains,” said Rachel Adams, founder of the Global Center on AI Governance. “But it can mean stronger control over sensitive data, better public procurement rules, investment in local infrastructure and skills, African language data sets, and clearer accountability for foreign AI providers.”
The structural imbalance is stark. Africans comprise 18% of the world’s population, but the continent holds less than 1% of global data center capacity, according to the World Economic Forum. The top five African markets combined have less capacity than France had in 2024, McKinsey found.
African companies are starting to build AI infrastructure, though largely with Western technology behind it. Cassava, founded by Zimbabwean entrepreneur Strive Masiyiwa, launched Africa’s first AI factory in South Africa with NVIDIA in March, while East African data center provider iXAfrica is working with Oracle to deliver Kenya’s first public cloud region. Microsoft’s $1 billion data center with G42 in Kenya stalled after the government held back from committing to the computing purchases the companies demanded. Several open-source African AI initiatives receive grants from Meta and run on Google Cloud, according to Hilda Barasa, a Kenya-based senior policy adviser at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
The depth of Western involvement raises questions about whose priorities shape Africa’s AI future. Anthropic’s AI partnership with Rwanda illustrates the tension. The deal “looks like a good deal because then Rwandans are going to be trained and the government is going to be able to improve public service capacity. But really what’s happening is that Anthropic is creating a very nice, low-hanging fruit way for somebody to absorb the cost of adoption for them,” said Ayantola Alayange, a researcher with the Global Center on AI Governance. “Just imagine the number of people that will be forced to use that technology.”
Some governments are already pushing back on data leaving the continent. Ghana, Nigeria and Zambia recently rejected U.S.-linked health data-sharing agreements that would move citizens’ data outside their borders. In the absence of domestic infrastructure, African governments are leaning toward “segmented” data setups, where processing happens abroad but data is stored within national borders, said Adeola Bojuwoye, Nigeria lead for the nonprofit Digital Impact Alliance.
But owning infrastructure is only the start. “We have seen in some other countries in North Africa, where they build data centers, put their data in, but then they outsource the management of the data center to a third-party provider, creating risks of technical vendor lock-in,” said Tay PeiChin, policy and program leader at the Tony Blair Institute, speaking at the India AI Impact Summit in February. “So it’s not just about having control, but having meaningful control.”
There are continental efforts underway. In July 2024, the African Union released a Continental AI Strategy, and in November 2025 the nonprofit Smart Africa established the Africa AI Council to pool resources. A $60 billion Africa AI Fund announced at the April 2025 Kigali Summit targets infrastructure, talent and startups, including 12,000 NVIDIA graphics processing units for centers in the four biggest economies and Morocco.
“There’s a real desire to act as a single digital marketplace. There’s a real, warranted wariness of China and the U.S., dependence on those two governments and commercial actors in those countries,” said Priya Vora, CEO of Digital Impact Alliance.
Yet African nations still compete against each other for foreign investment to become AI hubs, Adams said. Many projects, such as Nigeria’s Awarri, have not disclosed their back-end infrastructure, making it hard to measure their Western dependency, Bojuwoye said. Barasa of the Tony Blair Institute favors a regional approach, arguing no single country has the workload to justify building alone — but cooperation requires trust between governments that remains scarce. “The thing that we underestimate is that the cost of coordination is quite high and there’s a lot to overcome from a geopolitical or political economy perspective between countries, so there’s always the incentive for countries to negotiate bilaterally,” she said.
