Digital Silk Road
Digital Silk Road
China has no Hollywood. But it has AI. This is already being felt in Africa.
China is rebuilding the Silk Road all over the world; both physical and digital. The strategy of creating long-term impact with access to minerals and other resources in exchange for infrastructure investments in Africa (roads, hospitals, universities, data centers, 5G and cloud within the scope of Belt and Road / Digital Silk Road) is a known fact.
Chinese companies and technology transfer are also active in agriculture (in areas such as greenhouse cultivation and tomato production). A similar approach on the AI side: open source + low cost + infrastructure integration.
Andrew Ng, founder of Coursera, one of the pioneers of Google Brain and a Stanford student, states that vulnerability-oriented Chinese models (DeepSeek R1/V3, Alibaba Qwen family, etc.) are spreading faster in the Global South, especially in Africa, than American models, thanks to their cost and accessibility advantages. When comparing Hollywood-style soft power and AI, Ng emphasizes: Hollywood offered stories of freedom, democracy and individualism. AI models reflect the values of a nation with the answers they give to the questions asked. If open Chinese models dominate instead of closed American models, many applications and companies will be faced with models that “more reflect Chinese values.”
AI in Africa is still in its early stages and is practical, low-cost, focused on local problems. Although its market share is small, “leapfrog” potential is high in areas such as agriculture, health, education and finance:
Agriculture: Crop yield prediction, disease/pest detection, soil analysis, market price and weather alert (to farmers via mobile). Satellite + AI combinations (Morocco, Kenya examples).
Health: Diagnostic support, medication reminders, chronic disease monitoring, mother-baby health chatbots. It is reported that mobile health assistants are being developed in Kenya using Chinese open source models.
Education: Personalized learning, local language models like Swahili and Hausa, tools to fill the teacher gap.
Other: Mobile banking, utilities, drought and flood early warning systems.
The ideal scenario for Africa is to leverage competition rather than unilateral dependence: developing local talent, data sovereignty, multi-supplier and own capacity using Chinese models. The US side risks being left behind in this race without releasing more open, affordable and Global South-specific versions.
Soft power is now written from model weights and cloud servers rather than movie sets. Whoever makes the models public and useful gets more influence. China is ahead in Africa.