BY AD Essome and T Chiraerae
The 2025 G20 Summit in Johannesburg delivered an unambiguous message that artificial intelligence is indispensable for Africa’s future. While the summit spotlighted the G20’s role in enhancing Africa’s Development, the broader and more urgent challenge is that Africa currently lacks the foundational infrastructure to develop, train, deploy, and govern AI at continental scale. Without rapid, large-scale investment in energy, connectivity, computing, data centers, and talent, the historic G20 pledges made in Johannesburg in November 2025 will remain aspirational. We zoom squarely on those infrastructure deficits, the investment opportunities they present for the Global North, and the catalytic role that African institutions particularly the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Sustainable Development (CAISD) can play in closing the gap.
The Scale of the Infrastructure Deficit
Africa’s AI readiness lags dramatically behind global benchmarks. On the Energy front, Africa produced 919 TWh of electricity in 2023 while global data centres alone consumed 415 TWh in 2024, a figure expected to double by 2030 (International Energy Agency, cited in TechCabal Insights, 2025). Frequent outages and high costs make sustained GPU training nearly impossible outside a handful of urban pockets. In terms of connectivity, only 38 % of Africans were online in 2024 (global average: 68 %), leaving 860 million people beyond the reach of cloud-based or real-time AI services (Egwu, 2025). The continent hosts 1 % of global data-centre capacity despite representing 18 % of world population. Just over 140 colocation and hyperscale facilities existed in 2024, overwhelmingly concentrated in South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, and Morocco (Africa Data Centres Association, cited in CIPIT, 2025). This demonstrates weak computing power.
Africa has virtually no publicly accessible supercomputing clusters capable of training frontier models; researchers and firms rely on expensive, distant clouds in Europe and North America, raising latency, cost, and sovereignty concerns. In terms of talent, Africa accounts for only 3 % of global AI researchers and practitioners, exacerbated by brain drain and limited doctoral programmes (CIPIT, 2025). These gaps translate into a projected loss of up to $1.2 trillion in potential AI-enabled GDP gains by 2030 if unaddressed (African Centre for Economic Transformation, 2025).
G20 2025 as Catalyst
The Johannesburg outcomes explicitly recognised the infrastructure bottleneck. The Leaders’ Declaration, the new G20 Africa Engagement Framework 2025–2030, and the Ubuntu Legacy Initiative all call for accelerated deployment of digital tools and AI, with dedicated workstreams on SupTech/RegTech and AI-driven due diligence. Implementation, however, now rests on closing the very infrastructure deficits that the summit identified.
Strategic Investment Pathways for the Global North
2024 already demonstrated viable, replicable models that the Global North can scale aggressively. Microsoft and G42’s $1 billion geothermal-powered AI data centre in Kenya (launched 2024) proves that renewable-energy-backed hyperscale facilities are feasible on the continent (CIPIT, 2025). Similar projects in Morocco (Oracle), South Africa (Vantage) show private capital will flow when governments offer land, tax incentives, and long-term power-purchase agreements.
Sharing digital Infrastructure Corridors is another path worth considering. The World Economic Forum estimates that 700–1 000 new shared facilities by 2030 could unlock $1.2–1.5 trillion in economic value (WEF, 2025b). Northern development finance institutions (DFIs) and pension funds can provide first-loss equity or concessional debt to de-risk these regional hubs. Google’s Africa Connect Next and Equiano cable investments, combined with four regional cloud hubs rolled out in 2024, illustrate how Northern tech giants can expand backbone and last-mile connectivity while creating local AI inference points (Google, 2025).
Renewable Microgrids for Rural AI and talent and sovereign cloud Ecosystems can be another worthwhile strategic investment. Solar and hydro-powered edge nodes can bring low-latency AI to agriculture and health. The U.S. DFC, EIB, and Norfund have already piloted such models; scaling them could close the $68–100 billion annual infrastructure financing gap (Brookings Institution, 2025). Microsoft’s 2024 continent-wide AI skilling programmes and Google’s $17 million investment in African universities for curriculum and compute credits provide templates for blended public-private talent pipelines (Google, 2025; CIPIT, 2025).
The Global North has both strategic self-interest and moral imperative to act swiftly. A $50–70 billion committed pipeline over the next five years 2026–2030, channelled through PPPs, DFIs, and philanthropic guarantees would be sufficient to deliver continent-wide coverage of green data centres, 5G/low-earth-orbit connectivity, and sovereign HPC capacity. In return, investors gain first-mover access to a market that McKinsey projects could generate $61–103 billion annually from generative AI alone (McKinsey & Company, 2025).
The Unique Value Proposition of African institutions including CAISD
African institutions, led by organisations such as the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Sustainable Development (CAISD), can play a decisive coordinating and enabling role in closing the continental AI infrastructure gap. By hosting a Pan-African AI Centre of Excellence, running sovereign model-training pilots, and validating Africa-specific applications, these institutions can provide the technical leadership that investors need. They can accelerate adoption across the continent by openly sharing non-sensitive models and datasets under an “AI Commons for Africa” approach, lowering costs and barriers for start-ups and public agencies in all 55 countries. Through established partnerships with the African Union, the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF), the South African Reserve Bank, and others, they can harmonise policies and regulations, giving Global North partners the regulatory certainty they require. Finally, by serving as trusted local implementing partners for blended-finance projects, African institutions like CAISD can de-risk investments, ensure genuine technology transfer, and guarantee that new infrastructure remains African-owned and African-led. The Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Sustainable Development (CAISD) is uniquely positioned to orchestrate and accelerate these efforts. As a South African-based nexus of academia, government, industry, and regional bodies, CAISD can synergize the four critical layers of value cited above.
Final thoughts
The Johannesburg G20 handed Africa the policy mandate. The infrastructure gap hands the Global North the investment opportunity. With CAISD and similar African institutions as trusted partners, the continent can move from being a consumer of global AI to a producer and exporter of African-led AI solutions starting now.
References
African Centre for Economic Transformation. (2025). Unlocking Africa’s AI potential: Digital public infrastructure. https://acetforafrica.org
Brookings Institution. (2025). Leveraging AI and emerging technologies to unlock Africa’s potential. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/leveraging-ai-and-emerging-technologies-to-unlock-africas-potential/
Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Sustainable Development. (n.d.). Home. https://backend.caisd.africa/
Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law. (2025). The state of AI in Africa report 2025. https://aiconference.cipit.org/documents/the-state-of-ai-in-africa-report.pdf
Egwu, F. E. (2025, November 4). Africa’s offline majority risk missing out on the AI revolution. DevelopmentAid.
Google. (2025). We’re investing in connectivity, products and skills for Africa’s AI future. https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-africa/africas-ai-future/
McKinsey & Company. (2025, May 12). Leading, not lagging: Africa’s gen AI opportunity. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/leading-not-lagging-africas-gen-ai-opportunity
TechCabal Insights. (2025, November 4). The building blocks Africa needs for AI adoption. https://insights.techcabal.com
World Economic Forum. (2025a). How shared digital infrastructure can bridge the gap in Africa. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/04/how-shared-digital-infrastructure-can-bridge-the-gap-in-africa/
World Economic Forum. (2025b). Investment in “green” computing can unlock $1.5t in Africa. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/12/investing-in-green-compute-in-africa/3.2sFast
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