{"id":91398,"date":"2026-08-09T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T06:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/?p=91398"},"modified":"2026-08-08T17:53:02","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T23:53:02","slug":"chinas-a-i-is-surging-across-africa-that-should-worry-silicon-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/chinas-a-i-is-surging-across-africa-that-should-worry-silicon-valley\/","title":{"rendered":"China\u2019s A.I. is surging across Africa. That should worry Silicon Valley"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"China\u2019s<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When Ernest Mwebaze, a tech developer in Uganda, was building an artificial intelligence system last year tailored for his country\u2019s many languages, he tested American and Chinese tools to see which one could help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

China\u2019s won.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The A.I. model from the Chinese internet giant Alibaba handled Uganda\u2019s dozens of languages better than anything from Meta or Google, Mr. Mwebaze said. It was also inexpensive, and he could customize the model with his own data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe want to build things as cheap as possible, yet have them work really well,\u201d said Mr. Mwebaze, a former research scientist at Google. His system, called Sunflower, is now used across Uganda, including by farmers to receive weather information and crop advice in local dialects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Mwebaze, 47, is one of thousands of developers across Africa who have turned to Chinese A.I. models in the past year. In Kenya, entrepreneurs are using the models to streamline legal and business services. In Nigeria, they have made educational tools that teach high school students. In Ghana, developers are building local chatbots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

China\u2019s A.I. is surging, especially in developing countries, as people look for the best possible system at the lowest possible cost. Unlike models made by the leading American A.I. companies OpenAI and Anthropic \u2014 which are closed and charge fees \u2014 the Chinese systems are publicly available to download and modify without payment or approval.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chinese \u201copen-source\u201d models account for roughly half of total A.I. use on OpenRouter, a service with 400 A.I. models for users to choose from, up from less than 25 percent a year ago, according to a New York Times analysis of data from eight million customers. Chinese models are also 19 of the 25 most downloaded open-source systems on Hugging Face, another A.I. database.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In more than two dozen interviews across Kenya, Uganda and other countries, developers, policymakers and executives described a rapidly changing A.I. market where cost, computing resources, data control and customization mattered more than where a model was made. Often they were not looking for bleeding edge A.I. They just wanted something that worked well enough on limited resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using Chinese models was like owning a house while using U.S. models was like renting one, they added. Rather than spending millions to train a model from scratch, developers can download a Chinese system and build an entirely new product on top of it, paying mainly for servers. In contrast, U.S. models are a one-size-fits-all technology, needing subscriptions and other fees depending on the job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhy use an expensive Ferrari to do the school run when a Toyota hatchback can do the same?\u201d said Moses Kemibaro, a Nairobi entrepreneur who runs a digital marketing agency, Dotsavvy, adding that Chinese models can be up to 90 percent less expensive when including costs like computing infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chinese officials hope their gains in Africa are a preview of things to come. Last month, powerful new Chinese A.I. systems rattled Wall Street and Silicon Valley, stoking fears in Washington that U.S. tech dominance could be undercut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Xi Jinping, China\u2019s leader, is using A.I. as a form of soft power. At a July conference in Shanghai, he cast Chinese models as more reliable and cheaper and warned that A.I.\u2019s benefits must be shared or they would create \u201cnew historical injustices.\u201d Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa and seven other African countries signed an A.I. pact with China at the event to promote international cooperation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chinese firms are also courting African developers with free computing and hands-on engineering help, developers said. Many Chinese-made smartphones in Africa come with Chinese A.I. tools preinstalled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, China\u2019s A.I. industry faces challenges. Companies have struggled to make money from their users and face security questions about data and links to Beijing. Many African developers still pay for American A.I. models, especially for technical tasks like coding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet Africa\u2019s experience shows the global A.I. competition is now a two-horse race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kamal Budhabhatti, the chief executive of Craft Silicon, a Nairobi banking software company, feels the pull of both sides. He recently rebuilt his firm\u2019s tech systems with Claude Code, Anthropic\u2019s programming tool. A 10-person team finished in half the time a project that once took 100 engineers. The bill was high, he said, but the speed was worth it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, also came calling with \u201csome very unbelievable incentives\u201d to switch to Chinese systems, he said, including a year of free computing and a trip to the company\u2019s headquarters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very hard to say no,\u201d Mr. Budhabhatti said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The China Model<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About 50 miles southeast of Nairobi, one of Kenya\u2019s biggest collaborations with Chinese technology sits half-finished on the savanna.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Konza Technopolis, a planned city, was announced 18 years ago as Kenya\u2019s answer to Silicon Valley. Hopefully branded the Silicon Savannah, it is now a grid of empty boulevards and skeletal buildings, watched over by a powerful Chinese surveillance system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It would look like a failed experiment but for one slate-gray building behind an electric fence. Financed by Chinese loans and built by Huawei, the site is a data center that runs computing for Kenya\u2019s government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For two decades, Chinese firms have wired Africa\u2019s telecommunications networks and paved its roads. M-Pesa, Kenya\u2019s celebrated mobile-money system, runs on Huawei technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These tech ties gave China a foothold in the continent, which it is using to sell A.I. One project advertised at Konza will use technology from the Chinese A.I. firm DeepSeek to combat telecom fraud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Locked out of advanced chips because of U.S. export controls, Chinese companies could not outspend Silicon Valley. So they gave their A.I. models away as open source, hoping to pull people from U.S. rivals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first, it seemed a losing bet. The United States dominated open-source A.I. Meta offered a model called Llama that developers used worldwide. But after some stumbles, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta\u2019s chief executive, turned more to closed models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt left a huge hole,\u201d said Lucas Atkins, co-founder of Arcee A.I., an American start-up that builds open models. \u201cIt allowed the Chinese to explode into the vacuum.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Breakthroughs came quickly. In December 2024, a DeepSeek A.I. model matched the best models at a fraction of the cost. Last month, the Chinese A.I. lab Moonshot AI released a model with coding abilities approaching the leading American systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Kenya, developers embraced Chinese models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Michael Michie builds A.I. systems for Kenyan banks and government agencies at EverseTech. His customers are price sensitive, so he makes almost everything on Chinese open-source models. Businesses want the cheapest way to use the technology, not the most advanced, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think people should worry so much about who built it,\u201d he said. \u201cThe focus should be, does it deliver the capability you need?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sentai Simons, a start-up founder in Nairobi, downloaded Chinese models to build a product that turned paper legal records into searchable databases. He customized the system with about one million legal files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His product, JibuDocs, ended up about 140 gigabytes in size \u2014 smaller than many iPhones \u2014 and cost about $25,000 to create and maintain. Using a service like Anthropic\u2019s Claude, he said, would have cost more than $1 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s absolutely the difference between having a business and not having a business,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many developers said Chinese companies treated them like a priority, while U.S. firms were hardly present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ahmet Acar, a former principal adviser at Amazon Web Services who lives in Nairobi, said joining a developer program from Anthropic required a lengthy screening. Alibaba\u2019s took minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWith the Chinese, it was like: \u2018Hey, are you able to do this? Are you located here? All right, man, go have fun,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wake Up Call<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a Nairobi high-rise in June, a top Kenyan civil servant for technology said he was surprised when Anthropic pulled access to Fable, its powerful model, at the Trump administration\u2019s behest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a \u201cwake up call\u201d to the world, said John Tanui, the principal secretary in Kenya\u2019s Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy. The abrupt move was a warning that relying on U.S. models could pose risks, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A former Huawei employee who once led the Konza Technopolis project, Mr. Tanui said China and the United States had pressed Kenya to pick a side. He intends to take from both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t lean on West or East,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being in the middle is tricky. Developers are building systems controlled elsewhere, which means the technology can be yanked, altered or re-priced without warning. Some worry about dependence on the United States. Others do not trust China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Budhabhatti of Craft Silicon said he was considering Huawei\u2019s offer of generous subsidies, but was also cautious. Many of his customers are international banks that could demand their software not use Chinese hardware.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chinese models, too, have not always been reliable. Shikoh Gitau, the founder of the Nairobi start-up Qhala, recalled when DeepSeek went dark in China before the country\u2019s college entrance exams in 2024. It was to deter cheating, but it also disrupted African businesses like hers. Now American models could vanish because of a White House decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAt least with China\u2019s models, I can download it on my computer and run it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Others have been burned by A.I. politics. Mr. Mwebaze\u2019s Ugandan chatbot service, Sunflower, ran into trouble when a researcher at China Media Project, an independent media research group, asked it about China. Sunflower described China as a democracy and sidestepped questions about the country\u2019s economic and environmental impacts in Uganda.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chinese state media praised Sunflower, and Huawei contacted Mr. Mwebaze about using its cloud services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Mwebaze, whose nonprofit organization, Sunbird AI, is dedicated to A.I. for social good, was unnerved by the experience. He is now using Google\u2019s open-source model, Gemma, to create a product aimed at smartphone users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe need to make sure we\u2019re not on the wrong side of geopolitics,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

America Strikes Back<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all of China\u2019s momentum, much of the A.I. money in Kenya still flows to U.S. companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyday users are on U.S. systems like ChatGPT and Claude. One 2025 survey found that 42 percent of Kenya\u2019s 23 million internet users had used ChatGPT in the previous month, among the highest rate in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even Chinese models earn Americans money. Kenyan companies often run Chinese open-source models on cloud services from Amazon and Microsoft, so the U.S. giants make money from their data centers that deliver the technology to customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The U.S. advantage was clear in a concrete building in Nairobi\u2019s industrial district, where binders of paper purchase orders lined dark offices for Chandaria Industries, one of Kenya\u2019s largest makers of toilet paper, soap and home goods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For decades, orders arrived from supermarkets by email or on paper, and clerks keyed them in line by line. An order could take hours to process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chandaria recently hired Sanifu, a Kenyan start-up that uses A.I. to streamline business processes, for help. Sanifu uses OpenAI\u2019s models for precision and reliability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sanifu\u2019s digital system based on those U.S. models has transformed Chandaria. \u201cWhere an order took about two hours to process, that now takes less than 10 minutes,\u201d said Neer Chandaria, who helps run the family firm. Four clerks who once typed in orders now audit the A.I.\u2019s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Sanifu is being courted too. On LinkedIn this year, a Singaporean employee of the Chinese internet firm ByteDance offered Sanifu\u2019s founders access to its A.I. model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ByteDance\u2019s model was not accurate enough, but the courtship made an impression, said Bernard Momanyi Nyagaka, a co-founder of Sanifu. Nothing like it comes from the American labs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Chinese models keep improving, Mr. Nyagaka said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you look at how fast they\u2019re catching up with the American models, it\u2019s really, really fast,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n