Scramble for Africa 2.0: inside the AI race for Africa’s data

As an observer of technological developments in the African continent one is tempted to celebrate recent news, offers of cloud data infrastructure and others,  as progress however there’s also a reason for concern.

History, as I have often observed, has a habit of rhyming, even when the medium shifts from the tangible to the intangible. In the late 19th century, European powers carved up the continent with rulers and pencils, driven by the relentless hunger of the Second Industrial Revolution.

They sought rubber, minerals, and timber—the raw ingredients of a mechanical age—drawing borders with a reckless disregard for the people living within them.

Today, we are witnessing what I consider to be "Scramble 2.0," a high-stakes, largely invisible race for a commodity far more precious than iron or ore: data.

As we navigate the Fourth Industrial Revolution, global technology giants are positioning Africa as the critical frontier for Artificial Intelligence.

Yet, the pattern of engagement feels eerily familiar. The focus has shifted from extracting physical resources to extracting raw data, but the fundamental dynamic—a reinforcing cycle of dependency—remains largely unchanged.

To grasp the trajectory we are on, we must view it through a century-long lens.

In the 1960s, the geopolitical tug-of-war was over the copper required for electrical grids; in the 2020s, the battleground is cobalt for batteries; by the 2030s, the strategic prize will undoubtedly be who owns the AI training data.

Countries that built domestic technological capacity in previous eras—think of Egypt’s Aswan Dam or South Africa’s historic defence sector—found they could negotiate from a position of strength. Those that remained mere commodity exporters, however, became "price-takers," perpetually vulnerable to the fluctuations of global markets.

The continent risks cementing this "price-taker" status in the digital age if it continues to trade long-term data autonomy for the short-term allure of technological "gifts."

The anatomy of these new deals is revealing.

We see it in the aggressive public-private partnerships taking shape across the continent:

• South Africa: Google Cloud has established a Johannesburg Cloud Region and a Digital Exchange Port in the Eastern Cape. It is an investment that promises economic growth, yet it also binds local infrastructure to a singular, external technological ecosystem.
• Rwanda: The three-year Memorandum of Understanding to integrate Claude AI into public sectors like health and education is a masterclass in "embedded influence." While it aligns with Vision 2050, it risks creating a deep-seated reliance on a US-based model, potentially stifling the development of indigenous Large Language Models (LLMs) that could better reflect the local context.
• Kenya: The negotiations surrounding health data illustrate the friction between immediate infrastructure needs and the long-term necessity of privacy. While the Court of Appeal allowed the program to proceed to maintain health continuity, the pushback from civil society groups like COFEK signals a dawning realization: African health data is becoming a currency, and the exchange rate is not always favorable to the people.
• The Democratic Republic of the Congo: The deal with Atlas Park to use AI for geological mapping aims to improve the efficiency of mineral exploration. But one must ask: who controls the insights derived from those maps? When global firms hold the keys to a nation’s sub-surface knowledge, they effectively dictate the terms of exploration for decades.

If African leaders are to avoid this new era of technological subjugation, they cannot treat digital development as a passive receipt of foreign investment.

They must be as deliberate and strategic as the innovators who built the great systems of the past.

This requires three shifts:

1. Mandatory Local Value Addition: Just as South African mining policy evolved to insist that ore be processed domestically, AI partnerships must mandate the training of local developers and the hosting of data sets within the continent.
2. Regional Value Chains: As leaders like Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema have suggested, Africa must pool its resources. Building regional data centers and shared processing infrastructure is the only way to reduce reliance on foreign-owned clouds and build a collective bargaining position against the titans of Silicon Valley.
3. Governance as Competitive Advantage: Leaders must weave governance frameworks directly into their operational models. They must treat AI not merely as an IT project, but as a core pillar of national capability. As Kenya’s recent crypto legislation demonstrates, African nations have the agency to create regulatory frameworks that learn from, rather than replicate, the failures of the Global North.

The path forward is undeniably difficult. With Western development aid shrinking, nations are feeling the pressure to pivot toward transactional partnerships.

Yet, resilience is no longer just a policy goal; it is an existential imperative.

The nations that will succeed are those where adoption is guided by clear strategic direction, operational discipline, and a culture of relentless learning.

The continent has an opportunity to break from the past, but it will require prioritizing domestic technological capacity over the convenient, "off-the-shelf" solutions offered from abroad.

Africa has the chance to move from being the data-rich, value-poor subjects of the global tech economy to becoming the masters of its own digital destiny.

The scramble is on, but for the first time, the continent has the power to define the rules of the race.

Wesley Diphoko is a Technology Analyst and the Editor-In-Chief of FastCompany (SA) magazine.

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