China spurs Africa's leap in AI technology

At a converted warehouse on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, a dozen young programmers gather around used laptops to develop an application. The artificial intelligence model they are using is trained to spot crop disease from a single smartphone photo. Interestingly, their small business is increasingly tied to China.

Chinese firms such as Alibaba Group and Huawei Technologies have been promoting open-source AI models across Africa, targeting startups and innovation hubs. Freely available and modifiable, these models allow developers to build products without paying high licensing fees.

This approach contrasts sharply with that of most companies in the United States including OpenAI whose AI ecosystems are largely proprietary, with software, training data and algorithms tightly controlled by parent firms and monetized through paid access.

While global attention has focused on Western technology companies competing for lucrative enterprise contracts in the United States and the Middle East, the scene in Nairobi highlights a different strategy adopted by their Chinese counterparts.

In many African countries, computing power remains costly and scarce. Making AI cheaper and more energy-efficient could allow the world's most coveted technology to reach millions of new users, enabling local startups to design products tailored to African realities rather than external markets, industry experts said.

Wei Kai, head of the artificial intelligence research institute at the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, said that the shift reflects a deeper rollout of China's AI Plus initiative.

"China's AI companies going global have moved beyond the simple export of products or services. Instead, they are enabling the intelligent upgrading of local industrial chains through technology empowerment," Wei said.

Wei said that the overseas growth of Chinese AI technologies is not only about broadening application scenarios, but also about addressing concrete challenges in production and daily life.

"Chinese companies are exporting models, platforms and increasingly entire industrial solutions, helping other countries in how AI is built, deployed and governed worldwide," he added.

Africa's digital economy is estimated at about $180 billion — as compared to Open AI's roughly $500 billion valuation in recent equity deals.

In such an emerging market, Huawei and ZTE have supplied much of Africa's data centers, 5G and fiber-optic network equipment. Further down the technology stack, Transsion Holdings accounts for much of Africa's smartphone market, with Xiaomi and Honor gaining ground, while TikTok ranks among the continent's most downloaded apps.

China's "AI Plus" initiative sits at the center of this expansion. The State Council, China's Cabinet, has issued guidelines calling for deeper integration of AI across science and technology, industry, consumption, public services, governance and international cooperation.

China's AI sector has seen robust growth.

The World Intellectual Property Organization reported that between 2014 and 2023, China filed more than 38,000 generative AI patents — six times the number filed by the United States.

According to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, China's AI sector now counts more than 5,300 enterprises, accounting for about 15 percent of the global total.

The industry exceeded 900 billion yuan ($126.7 billion) in 2024, up 24 percent year-on-year. Revenues from foundational infrastructure, model architecture and industry applications rose 54 percent, 18 percent and 13 percent, respectively.

In the Middle East, Chinese companies are integrating AI with the internet of things in national projects such as Saudi Arabia's NEOM city and the UAE's Smart Dubai initiative, helping build efficient resource management and urban security systems in desert environments.

In Southeast Asia, industrial vision inspection and predictive maintenance solutions provided by Chinese AI firms are already being deployed in electronics and auto-parts factories in Vietnam and Thailand.

"These practices create commercial value, but more importantly, they improve quality of life, enhance social resilience and push inclusive technology adoption on a global scale," Wei said.

China's AI rise comes amid intensifying competition with the United States over AI chips and algorithms. Washington has expanded export controls, adding dozens of Chinese AI entities, including the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, to restriction lists.

The measures have constrained China's access to advanced chips, but industry experts said that they have also accelerated domestic innovation and encouraged efficiency-driven approaches such as model compression and edge computing.

Zheng Yongnian, dean of the School of Public Policy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), criticized as "unwise" the inclusion of Chinese companies in restrictive measures aimed at hindering China's AI progress.

"China possesses significant advantages in application scenarios, with the government actively promoting the AI Plus initiative to expedite technological implementation. US sanctions on technologies have, paradoxically, spurred China in intensifying investments in these areas and fostering indigenous innovation," Zheng said.

"If China's AI technologies continue to evolve at the current pace, the United States might find itself relying on China's original innovations in certain sectors within 10 to 15 years," he added.

Kai-Fu Lee, renowned AI expert and chairman of investment firm Sinovation Ventures, said China has already reached its "DeepSeek moment" and its success has awakened the Chinese market and ushered in a new AI era.

"DeepSeek's rise proves that closed-source AI has no future, and only open-source development will drive greater progress," said Lee, calling for global cooperation in AI.

One of the clearest signals of that shift lies in open-source AI.

According to a joint report by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Hugging Face, Chinese-developed open-source large language models accounted for 17.1 percent of global downloads over the past year, surpassing the United States' 15.8 percent for the first time.

Models such as DeepSeek's V3 and Moonshot AI's Kimi K2 have driven a surge in adoption, together representing nearly 30 percent of global usage of open-source large language models last year, the report said.

As Chinese AI spreads, so does Beijing's engagement in global governance. China has promoted principles of people-centered development, inclusive access and collaborative governance in international forums.

At the 78th United Nations General Assembly, a China-proposed resolution on strengthening international cooperation in AI capacity building was adopted by consensus, a move Beijing said reflected broad recognition of its approach to bridging the digital divide.

Zeng Yi, a member of the United Nations' high-level advisory body on AI and a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Automation, said: "The future of AI is not decided by a handful of countries, but by nearly 200 countries and regions. The world is big enough to embrace both the US and China to codevelop AI."