Africa's AI moment: $1 trillion on the table by 2035 — and a fight over who owns the pipes
The African Development Bank says artificial intelligence could add up to $1 trillion to the continent's economy by 2035. The harder question is who will own the data centres, models and cloud it runs on.
Africa is having its artificial-intelligence moment, and the numbers behind it are hard to ignore. A recent African Development Bank assessment projects that inclusive AI deployment could add up to $1 trillion to the continent's GDP by 2035 — a figure equivalent to nearly a third of Africa's current economic output. The gains, the bank argues, would come not from chatbots but from productivity: better yields in agriculture, faster diagnosis in health systems, sharper credit decisions in finance, and leaner delivery of public services.
That is the promise. The fight is over the plumbing.
Artificial intelligence does not run on ambition; it runs on data centres, electricity, fibre and cloud. As foreign technology companies pour capital into African compute, a pointed question is moving from policy seminars into government cabinets: how much control will African countries ultimately keep over the infrastructure their economies are about to depend on? It is the same dependency debate that shaped oil, telecoms and undersea cables — now replaying at the speed of a GPU cluster.
The build-out is already substantial. By the middle of 2025 the continent hosted 223 data centres across 38 countries, led by South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria, with the market projected to reach roughly $9.15 billion by 2029. Governments are racing to keep pace on policy: Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and Ghana have each published national AI strategies emphasising local capacity and reduced dependence on foreign providers, and 49 countries plus the African Union have endorsed the Africa Declaration on Artificial Intelligence, which calls for coordinated investment in African infrastructure, talent and financing.
The exponential-growth lens is what makes this urgent. Compute compounds: whoever owns the data centres and the models captures not just today's revenue but the data, the talent pipeline and the pricing power of everything built on top. A continent that rents its intelligence from abroad captures a thin slice of a trillion-dollar opportunity. A continent that owns even part of the stack captures the compounding.
None of this is guaranteed. Power reliability, skills shortages and financing costs remain real constraints, and a $1 trillion projection is a ceiling, not a forecast. But the direction of travel is clear, and for once Africa is early rather than late. The countries that treat AI infrastructure as strategic — the way they once treated ports and grids — will set the terms for the decade. The rest will pay them.