The New Geopolitics of Tech: Where Can Africa Build Real Power in the Age of AI?

When the United States and China control every layer of AI infrastructure—from semiconductors to cloud platforms to frontier models—where can emerging economies exert genuine influence?

In November 2025, ahead of the G20 Leaders’ Summit, New America’s Planetary Politics Initiative brought 80 policymakers, scholars, technologists, and industry leaders to Cape Town to answer this question. Our third annual Digital Futures Symposium combined infrastructure reality checks with strategic policy deliberations.

Participants toured the Léon Thévenin submarine cable repair vessel, confronting a stark fact: 99 percent of Africa’s intercontinental data traffic depends on foreign maintenance capacity. They visited South Africa’s Centre for High Performance Computing, observing how African institutions navigate hardware procurement delays and power constraints through creative adaptation.

The central insight: Africa’s leverage doesn’t come from replicating full-stack AI infrastructure. It comes from strategic indispensability—through critical minerals, submarine cable chokepoints, local data, energy assets, and a rapidly growing population and talent pool.

The symposium identified six priority research domains, from comprehensive value chain mapping to alternative ownership models that position communities as equity holders rather than extraction sites. These findings will feed into 2026 T20 processes as the United States assumes the G20 chair. Convened in partnership with the Global Center on AI Governance, University of Cape Town’s AI Initiative, and Kwame Nkrumah University’s Responsible AI Lab, the symposium forged ongoing partnerships to transform diagnosis into action—offering emerging economies practical frameworks for building genuine agency in global AI systems.

Read more about the symposium’s findings here.

Digital sovereignty doesn’t start with algorithms. It starts with infrastructure. Below, watch highlights from our Digital Futures Symposium in Cape Town, where 80 leaders explored how emerging economies can move from extractive participation to genuine agency in global AI systems.