Global South’s dedication to the future

WAIC furnishes China-Africa AI relations with a systematic opportunity to evolve from 'technology cooperation' to 'scenario symbiosis'

The successful convening of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance in Shanghai in July highlighted China's commitment to building a fair and reasonable global AI governance system, making this technology another key international public good. From the release of the action plan on AI cooperation and development to the launch of the World Artificial Intelligence  Cooperation Organization, the series of institutional arrangements and pragmatic measures initiated by China tap into the structural digital deficit that has long been frustrating Africa's modernization, and will help the continent with a new paradigm to crystallize its ambitious AI strategies, enriching the time-honored China-Africa friendship with a new connotation of a shared and inclusive digital transformation.

By planning to build an international AI application cooperation center at the African Union, China echoed Africa's unified vision for ethical, inclusive and sustainable AI development, as called for by the African Declaration on AI, with concrete actions. WAICO provides its members with an open institutionalized framework for parity-based dialogue and substantive cooperation, in which some African countries can articulate a stronger voice regarding indigenous AI capacity building in the international arena as 10 of the founding members of WAICO are from Africa.

Through open-source inclusivity and computing accessibility, China and Africa can work together to help bridge Africa's digital gaps via an affordable pathway toward AI adoption. Alongside the rapid expansion of its digital footprints in the past decade, Africa's position in the global compute landscape is weakening. According to the Interim Report 2025 of Unlocking Compute in Africa, compiled by the Africa Green Compute Coalition, Africa accounts for "less than 1 percent of global data center capacity" despite hosting 18 percent of the world's population, because of salient obstacles including prohibitive computing costs, inadequate infrastructure and acute funding shortages. The principles of greater access to high-quality data, more inclusive intelligent computing services, and broader sharing of open-source AI ecosystems championed at WAIC can offer Africa a viable alternative to gradually build up localized AI capacities to overcome these challenges.

With models such as DeepSeek, which have gained a high usage intensity in Africa, the further engagement of top Chinese large language models in the continent's digital transformation will continue to promote an integrated framework of "open-source foundation models plus indigenous corpora". This will enable Africa's low-rank adaptation, or LoRA, to be one of the primary beneficiaries of cost-effective technological support brought by inclusive intelligent computing services. Moreover, China's call for building green energy-driven infrastructure also aligns with Africa's renewable energy endowments.

By gradually localizing the model of "green power plus edge computing" across the continent, Africa can help reduce the barriers to technological access for African end-users, especially universities, enterprises and innovators in small cities and rural areas.

Unlike Western tech-transfer paradigms that prioritize "parameters racing" over "practical efficacy" in Africa, China's call for inclusive, ethical "AI for good" at WAIC depicts a new blueprint of AI empowerment across all industries, unleashing a new digital dynamic for the continent. With the delivery of the MAZU (Multi-hazard, Alert, Zero-gap and Universal) meteorological early warning system, which promotes climate resilience in the Horn of Africa, China attaches more importance to sharing its mature and scalable models concerning public well-being with the continent, and China can be more engaged in Africa's endeavor to customize digital resources to priority development sectors including agriculture, rural development, healthcare, and education. AI empowerment will, thereby, not only enhance the quality and efficiency of public service delivery across the continent, but also improve its reach to the whole society, ensuring that dividends of the digital era are inclusively shared by all.

According to a report titled "Harnessing the transformative power of AI in Africa", published in August 2025 by US payments giant Mastercard, boasting the world's youngest population, Africa's AI market is projected to grow to around $16 billion in 2030, providing abundant application scenarios and development space for the application of AI technology. In the process of embracing application mechanisms including low-barrier human-computer interaction, and industry-specific systems of Chinese LLMs, Africa can also dynamically bolster the user base of China's technological prototypes. Meanwhile, the multilingual landscape of Africa can contribute to enriching the multilingual corpus of Chinese AI models.

From Uganda's Sunflower LLM which covers 31 local languages and enables local coffee farmers to query agricultural advice in their native dialects, to South Africa's Masakhane LLM which promotes learning of underrepresented African native languages, multilingual LoRA of LLMs in Africa can constructively support Chinese models to evolve from platforms with original bilingual dominance of Chinese and English into robust low-resource multilingual architectures. The wide adoption of the cost-effective technology stack of "low-power consumption plus renewable energy plus privatized deployment" across the continent can serve as a replicable template to explore cost compatibility of Chinese AI technology with markets of other developing countries.

In essence, WAIC has furnished China-Africa AI relations with a systematic opportunity to evolve from "technology cooperation" to "scenario symbiosis", and paved new approaches to inject synergy into China's "AI Plus" initiative in the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) period and the AU's Continental AI Strategy.

Looking forward, driven by an AI-empowered China-Africa partnership, enhanced African digital sovereignty and capacity will not only become a pivotal driver for implementing the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the AU's Agenda 2063 across the continent, but also a vivid manifestation of the dedication of the Global South to jointly create the future of all humankind.

The author is the deputy director of the Division of Security Studies at the China-Africa Institute. 

The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.