By Sonny Iroche
When I saw the images of Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, and Greg Brockman seated together at a White House dinner during the visit of the Saudi Crown Prince, my immediate thought was this: the world is rearranging itself around artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and data infrastructure; and Africa must not remain a spectator.
This was no ordinary diplomatic dinner. It was a convergence of the three most influential figures shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution:
• Elon Musk, leading Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, and X; controlling the frontier of autonomous systems, rockets, supercomputers, satellites and AI-integrated platforms.
• Jensen Huang, the architect of NVIDIA’s $5 trillion ascent and the undisputed global godfather of AI chips.
• Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, one of the engines behind generative AI and the rapid diffusion of machine intelligence into global economies.
Their presence in Washington at a high-level event involving US and the Middle East economic ties, reveals a simple truth: AI is no longer just a technological matter. It is a geopolitical currency.
The US wants to maintain AI supremacy. The Middle East wants to diversify beyond oil into computational power, energy-efficient data centers, and sovereign AI models. And American companies need access to capital, markets, and energy resources to maintain their lead.
But the question we must ask; not merely as observers but as Africans deeply concerned about our continent’s future, is:
Where does Nigeria, and indeed Africa, stand in this new global alignment?
First , the Global North–South Technology Gap Is Widening
For decades, Africa has trailed behind the global North in infrastructure, education, research, and technological sophistication. But AI is accelerating and magnifying this gap. The Musk-Huang-Brockman trio are representative of a world moving at a speed that traditional African political and economic structures are not prepared for.
The hard truth is that the African continent is ill-prepared for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, not because Africans lack talent, but because we lack:
• Large-scale compute infrastructure
• Clean and reliable energy to power data centers
• AI-ready education systems
• Sovereign data policies
• Research institutions with cutting-edge capabilities
• Long-term industrial strategy
Meanwhile, the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have embraced a strategic, well-funded, long-horizon approach to AI. In contrast, African nations are still debating basic issues such as electricity supply, insecurity, and curriculum reform.
The geopolitical symbolism of that White House dinner was unmistakable:
those who control chips, compute, and capital will control the next century.
Secondly, the Global Spread of Data Centers and What It Means for Africa
One of the quietest but most consequential transformations of the last decade is the spatial geography of global data centers.
Where are the world’s data centers located?
Data shows heavy clustering in:
• United States (particularly Virginia, Texas, California)
• Europe (Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, UK)
• Asia (Singapore, South Korea, Japan)
• Middle East (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar rising rapidly)
Africa accounts for less than 1.5% of global data center capacity.
Even the existing African data centers often depend heavily on:
• foreign ownership
• foreign-built infrastructure
• imported hardware
• imported cloud services
• and no serious local chip production
This creates a structural dependency: Africa rents the AI future instead of owning it.
Biases and Consequences
The global spread of data centers is biased by:
• Proximity to capital
• Access to cheap, stable electricity
• Political stability
• Regulatory clarity
• Availability of high-tech talent
Africa struggles on many of these fronts.
What does this mean?
1. African data is often stored offshore, exposing it to foreign jurisdiction and exploitation.
2. AI models are trained on datasets that either under-represent or misrepresent Africans, reinforcing global biases.
3. African companies pay exponentially more for cloud computing and enterprise AI systems.
4. The continent lacks sovereignty over its digital identity, digital economy, and digital future.
If data is the “new oil,” then Africa is exporting crude data and importing refined intelligence, exactly the same colonial pattern that kept Africa underdeveloped in the commodity era.
Thirdly, the Democratization of AI vs. The Reality of AI Monopolies
The global conversation often frames AI as a democratizing force, accessible to anyone with curiosity and a laptop. That is true at the level of using AI tools. But at the foundational layer, training frontier models, building data centers, manufacturing semiconductors, maintaining sovereignty, the world is anything but democratic.
When Musk, Huang, and Brockman gather at the White House, what we are witnessing is:
• the consolidation of influence
• the negotiation of global priorities
• the shaping of AI governance
• the alignment of capital and political power
Africa must not assume that openness or democratized access is guaranteed.
Openness exists only when it aligns with the geopolitical interests of those who hold power.
Fourthly, what does this mean for Nigeria and Africa?
A. Africa’s Youth Must Be Our Strategic Advantage
Africa will have 42% of the global youth population by 2050. This is not just a demographic fact, it is a strategic weapon if properly harnessed.
Nigeria and Africa must:
• Build AI-first universities and technical institutes
• Establish coding and robotics academies in every state
• Incentivize youth participation in global AI competitions, hackathons, and research labs
• Provide scholarships, acceleration programs, and venture capital to young innovators
• Integrate AI literacy into primary and secondary school curricula
Our youth must not learn AI passively. They must create, compete, and lead.
B. African Political Leaders Must Treat AI as a National Security Priority
Just as countries defend their physical borders, Africa must defend its data sovereignty, AI sovereignty, and cyber sovereignty.
Political leaders must:
• Enact strong but enabling AI governance frameworks
• Build national compute infrastructure
• Establish sovereign cloud and data center strategies
• Incentivize local chip research and embedded systems engineering
• Benchmark national policies against global leaders like South Korea, Singapore, UAE, and Saudi Arabia
African leaders must stop seeing technology as a luxury and start seeing it as the foundation of national survival in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
C. Business Leaders Must Drive AI Readiness and Adoption
The private sector, banks, telcos, insurance companies, logistics, manufacturing, agriculture, must become AI-first enterprises.
They must:
• Conduct AI readiness assessments
• Deploy AI-powered automation and analytics
• Train their workforce in AI fluency
• Build enterprise data governance structures
• Cooperate with government on data sharing for national models
No African company will survive global competition without embedding AI at the core of its operations.
This is no longer optional.
D. Africa Must Build Its Own Data Centers, not Outsource its Future
Africa must urgently develop:
• Tier-3 and Tier-4 data centers
• AI-supercomputing facilities
• Local cloud infrastructure
• Renewable-energy–powered compute hubs
• Distributed fiber-optic networks
We must stop exporting raw data.
We must refine African data in Africa, process it in Africa, and build AI models that reflect African realities, African languages, and African priorities.
Anything less will condemn us to digital colonialism for another century.
Fifthly, charting a Path to an AI-Ready Africa
As someone deeply involved in AI policy, advisory work, and capacity-building across Nigeria, and Africa, I believe the window is closing, but it has not closed yet. Africa can still rise. But we must take decisive actions.
Five Recommendations for an African AI Renaissance
1. A Pan-African AI Strategy
An integrated, continent-wide AI development plan, compute, data, talent, governance, and innovation.
2. Sovereign African Compute Network (SACN)
A distributed network of African-owned data centers powering homegrown AI models.
3. Mass Talent Acceleration
Train 10 million Africans in AI, cybersecurity, data science, robotics, and software engineering over 10 years.
4. AI for Economic Productivity
Apply AI in agriculture, mining, security, manufacturing, logistics, finance, and governance to close the productivity gap.
5. Regulatory Diplomacy
Africa needs a seat at the global tables shaping AI governance — otherwise, we will be mere rule-takers.
Conclusion: Africa Must Sit at the Table and Not Watch From the Sidelines
The image of Musk, Huang, and Brockman at the White House dinner is more than a photograph. It is a signal, a warning, that the race for AI supremacy is intensifying.
Africa can no longer afford complacency, bureaucracy, or short-term political thinking.
We must embrace:
• Bold vision
• Strategic partnerships
• Sovereign infrastructure
• AI-first education
• Youth empowerment
• Pan-African collaboration
• Decisive leadership
This is the defining moment of our century.
As Nigerians and Africans, we stand at a crossroads:
either we seize this moment and shape the future, or we allow the future to be shaped without us.
And the cost of inaction will be irreversible.
NB: Sonny Iroche is the CEO of GenAI Learning Concepts Ltd, a pioneer AI Consulting firm in Nigeria. He was a 2022-2023 Senior Academic Fellow at the African Studies Centre of the University of Oxford. He is an Oxford University trained AI expert. Iroche is a member of the UNESCO Technical Working Group on AI Readiness Assessment Methodology and a member of the Nigerian National AI Strategy Committee that drafted Nigeria’s AI Strategic framework in April 2024. Iroche has published several articles in leading Nigerian and African newspapers on economic development and AI.
