Nigeria's telecom regulator and industry leaders have called for urgent collaboration to build Africa's artificial intelligence infrastructure, warning that the continent risks falling behind global powers investing heavily in compute capacity, cloud infrastructure and advanced chips.
The concerns were raised at a high-level virtual forum organised by Africa Hyperscalers, which brought together regulators, operators, cloud providers, data-centre companies and AI experts to discuss what Africa must build to compete in an AI-driven economy.
Nigerian Communications Commission CEO, Dr Aminu Maida, said AI has become a basic infrastructure requirement, just like roads and power. He warned that countries that fail to build local compute, data and algorithmic capability will be relegated to consuming foreign innovation.
