Chinese AI gains ground in Africa

Chinese technology companies are emerging as important contributors to Africa's artificial intelligence ecosystem, particularly by promoting open-source AI models, experts say.

Wu Chenglin, founder and CEO of DeepWisdom in Xiamen, Fujian province, said open-source AI is playing a growing role in lowering barriers to technology adoption and expanding access to advanced digital tools across emerging markets, including Africa.

Such models allow developers and businesses to download model weights, deploy them locally, modify architectures and train systems using their own data, making AI more accessible than traditional closed-source systems, Wu said.

In recent years, Chinese tech companies have increasingly embraced open-source strategies to accelerate innovation and expand global collaboration, he said. Companies such as Alibaba, Baidu and ByteDance have released or supported open-source large language models, attracting developers worldwide.

Wu said this approach helps reduce the cost and technical barriers of building AI solutions, allowing entrepreneurs, small businesses and independent developers to experiment with the technology.

Some developers in Africa are already using Chinese open-source AI to address local challenges. In Kenya, a company has used DeepWisdom's Atoms model to develop Yotu Health, a mobile AI co-pilot that helps users monitor blood sugar levels, manage medication schedules and navigate their daily health.

Harun Katusya, a Kenya-based data scientist, said United States companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, alongside Chinese developers of models including DeepSeek, are part of a broader contest to shape the future of the global AI ecosystem.

"Africa sits at the center of this emerging contest because it is a massive untapped digital market, and many institutions are rapidly digitizing without strong AI governance frameworks," he said.

Degree of control

Lawrence Nderu, a research fellow at the Department of Computing at Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, said the key advantage of Chinese open-weight AI models over many closed alternatives is the degree of control they offer.

"With open-weight models, African teams can host systems locally, reduce dependency, protect sensitive data, fine-tune domain-specific datasets, and build solutions that reflect African priorities rather than simply consuming AI products designed for other markets," Nderu said.

Such control is critical in sectors including healthcare, education, finance, agriculture and public administration, where trust, regulatory compliance and long-term sustainability are paramount, he said.

"We are now talking about AI sovereignty, which is part of our AI strategy in Kenya," he said, adding that African countries should use open-weight models as a foundation for building their own AI capabilities.

"We should use these models as scaffolding to train our researchers, build our datasets, develop African language benchmarks, create domain-specific models, and ultimately produce AI systems that are owned, governed and sustained by African institutions," he said.

The real opportunity lies not in simply adopting Chinese AI, but in turning it into a catalyst for African-built, African-governed and African-relevant AI solutions, Nderu said.

However, he cautioned that policymakers and institutions must carefully assess open-source technologies to mitigate potential risks, particularly those related to data protection.

According to the African Development Bank Group, if developed and deployed inclusively, AI could add up to $1 trillion to African economies' GDP by 2035, equivalent to nearly one-third of the continent's current economic output.