Abuja AI summit hears call for Africa to own its computing power

African governments, researchers and media owners met in Abuja this week to ask a simple question: who will own the computers that power the continent's artificial intelligence?

The BUILD Conference, held from October 21 to 23, 2026, was organised by the Nigeria AI Collective under the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy. Its theme was "Building Africa's Shared Compute and AI Infrastructure".

Policymakers, students, journalists, investors and innovators attended. Much of the discussion centred on computing power, known as compute: the data centres, fibre links, electricity and specialised chips that AI systems need to run.

The gap in numbers

According to industry estimates cited at the event, three American firms — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — hold more than 65 per cent of global cloud capacity. Africa, home to about 18 per cent of the world's people, holds less than one per cent.

That imbalance was described as a new form of dependence, one run through service contracts and training data rather than colonial maps.

The Chief Executive Officer of the Newspaper Proprietors' Association of Nigeria (NPAN), Adediran, used the platform to argue that the continent's news industry is already feeling the effects.

He said foreign platforms have taken more than 80 per cent of local digital advertising in key African markets, according to the Reuters Institute. Publishers who once relied on those platforms for readers have cut newsroom staff in the past two years, he said, not because audiences disappeared but because the platforms changed how news is shown.

He also warned that African journalism is being used to train large language models without permission or payment, and that chatbots now summarise original reporting without sending readers or revenue back to the newsroom.

Surveys by the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Research suggest more than 60 per cent of African journalists struggle to tell genuine sources from fabricated ones, he said, pointing to fake bylines and deepfake audio.

He noted that the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) has opened inquiries into such practices.

What happens next

Adediran proposed three steps: a continental bargaining code requiring AI developers to license and pay for African content used in training; a rule that public data be stored on servers physically in Africa and under African law; and an African Union target, through the African Continental Free Trade Area, of five per cent of global data centre capacity on African soil by 2030.

He said the continent already draws more than $2 billion a year in data centre investment, and that policy now needs to direct and expand it.

No decisions were announced at the close of the conference. The proposals remain ideas for governments and the African Union to consider.