Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not a single service, product, or technology.
It is an industry with five layers.
The first is energy, the electricity that AI consumes in enormous quantities.
The second consists of chips: specialised processors such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and Neural Processing Units (NPUs) that perform the computing.
The third is infrastructure – the data centres and the new AI factories that turn electricity and silicon into intelligence.
The fourth consists of Large Language Models (LLMs), including the frontier models built by a handful of firms in the United States and the open-source alternatives, whose development is dominated by China.
The fifth is defined by applications – the AI systems and tools deployable across all socio-economic and political sectors.
Africa’s instinct has been to engage only at the top layer, consuming applications built elsewhere and running on models, chips, and data centres owned in the United States, China, and Europe.
That is the mineral trap in digital form – export raw inputs and import finished goods.
Africans must participate in all five layers of the AI industry.
We have the sun, wind, water, critical minerals, oil and gas to power AI.
We hold cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, graphite, and rare earth elements in every chip and battery.
We have the youngest population on Earth. What we lack is the ambition, leadership, agency, and unity to climb the whole AI stack.
The AI revolution demands scale and numbers at every level.
A single frontier data centre or AI factory can draw as much power as a country like Zimbabwe – 2000 MW.
Designing, building and training leading models costs billions of dollars.
Building a competitive talent pipeline of engineers, researchers and mathematicians takes decades and large markets to sustain.
No individual African country has the energy, capital or depth of expertise to compete alone.
Nigeria is too small.
South Africa is too small.
Egypt is too small.
Individual African economies will not be consequential in the AI Revolution.
Let that sink in!
That is why economic integration and political unity are no longer romantic Pan-African ideals.
They are survival requirements.
With 55 Presidents (or Prime Ministers) negotiating separately with the technology giants and great powers, Africa will be a victim of the AI revolution.
As fragmented, non-viable states, the continent has no chance. Each country will sign its own data deal, mineral deal, cloud contract, and AI arrangements.
This is unsustainable.
Of course, external players (companies and countries) will benefit at Africans’ expense.
Only a continent that negotiates as one market of 1.4 billion people and a collective GDP of US$ 3.4 trillion can demand local data harvesting, curation, and storage; shared infrastructure; technology transfer; and fair terms.
Only an economically integrated and politically united continent can create AI systems and participate in all five layers of the AI industry.
The African Continental Free Trade Area and the African Union constitute a good starting point.
The continent needs a genuine single digital, industrial, and AI-driven market, backed by political unity.
The urgency grows when we look ahead.
Several leaders of frontier AI laboratories in the United States now predict the attainment of Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) – an AI system that creates its own successor, without human involvement – by 2028.
Some forecast Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), meaning AI systems that surpass collective human intelligence, by 2036.
These dates are contested and may prove wrong.
But serious economies and societies are planning around these predictions, and Africa cannot afford to be the only region not doing so.
Two dangers follow the achievement of RSI and ASI.
The first is misuse.
Powerful AI systems in the hands of bad actors can lead to disinformation, fraud, cyberattacks, bioterrorism, mass surveillance, autonomous weapon systems, and autonomous nuclear weapon systems.
The second is loss of control.
The risk is that increasingly capable systems pursue goals their creators did not intend, faster than humans can correct them.
An AI system smarter than the world’s smartest human being cannot be controlled by a person.
Any view to the contrary, is pure folly – humanity’s collective hubris!
How can you create a god and insist you will make the god your slave?
Both potential dangers (misuse and loss of control) are global, but their consequences for Africa are sharper.
Our institutions are weaker, our infrastructure fragile, our regulators under-resourced and under-trained, and our cybersecurity systems thin.
We have almost no voice in the laboratories and forums where safety rules, guardrails and governance are being developed.
A continent absent from the table risks absorbing AI harms while others capture its benefits.
How, then, do Africans unlock the promise of AI while mitigating its dangers?
First, invest continentally in energy and compute.
Regional power pools and shared AI factories, located where renewable power is abundant, can serve many countries simultaneously.
Second, turn natural resources into leverage.
Africa must condition access to its critical minerals on local refining, beneficiation, chip-related manufacturing, and investment in data centres and AI factories on African soil.
Third, build talent at continental scale. Pool universities, research centres, and scholarships across borders, and bring the diaspora home through structured programmes.
Fourth, back African models, anchored in African languages, insights, and culture.
Open-source AI models, trained on African languages and data, can serve African needs without paying permanent rent to foreign platforms.
Fifth, govern AI together, as united Africans.
A single African AI safety and harmonised standards framework, anchored in the African Union, would carry more weight than 55 separate regulations ever could.
Such an arrangement would secure Africa’s seat at global safety negotiations.
Africa also has a rare chance to leapfrog.
It did so with mobile telephony and mobile money, skipping landlines and bank branches entirely.
With AI, the continent can bypass outdated industrial models and deploy intelligent agriculture, diagnostics, education, and mineral exploration directly.
But leapfrogging requires both agency and unity.
Agency means Africans deciding their own AI future, rather than accepting whatever arrives.
Unity means acting on a continental scale.
Without agency, unity is an empty shell.
Without unity, agency is powerless.
Africa needs both, and it needs them now as AI capabilities expand exponentially.
On Agency
Agency is the capacity of a person, group, nation or continent to act on its own behalf.
That means making its own choices, setting its own goals, and shaping its own circumstances, rather than having others decide or impose outcomes.
It has three parts:
- Self-determination: deciding what you want and where you intend to go.
- Capability: having the knowledge, resources and institutions to act on those decisions.
- Ownership of consequences: taking responsibility for the results and adjusting course.
Indeed, we need African Agency in the AI Revolution
On renaming AI as Superintelligence
It is the most illiterate thing ever done.
Pure nonsense.
You cannot rename a field using a term that already exists in the same field.
It is the dumbest thing ever.
“This goat is very big. Goats are very big things.
From now on, a goat is going to be called an elephant!
We are no longer going to use the term goat.
Only the term elephant!!”
Great.
But elephants do exist.
What are we going to call them, if goats are now called elephants?
Anyone who knows anything about the AI field was thoroughly embarrassed by those Trump remarks.
Have you seen anyone serious take up that misguided, unintelligent terminology?
Even his own technology and science advisors were thoroughly embarrassed.
*The author of this article is Professor Arthur G.O. Mutambara, the Executive Director and Full Professor of the Institute for the Future of Knowledge (IFK) at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). The views expressed by Professor Arthur G.O. Mutambara are not necessarily those of The Bulrushes
