Africa is accelerating its adoption of artificial intelligence, but a quiet geopolitical contest is taking shape over where the physical infrastructure of this revolution will be located. The continent faces a stark choice: build sovereign compute infrastructure or accept a new form of digital dependency dressed in convenience. While global technology giants continue placing their data centres in established hubs such as Cape Town — home to some of the continent's largest hyperscaler facilities from Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and others — countries like Mozambique are pushing back against the narrative that they should merely consume foreign models.

On the sidelines of GITEX Nigeria, one of West Africa's largest technology gatherings, Professor Lourino Chemane, President of the Board of Directors of the National Institute of Information and Communication Technologies (INTIC) in Mozambique, laid out a defiant yet pragmatic vision for the region. In an exclusive interview, Chemane explained how Mozambique intends to move from being a passive resource provider to a central hub for Southern African AI infrastructure.

Mozambique is not in any competition

The Southern African Development Community (SADC), the 16-member regional bloc, has long debated shared compute pools as a way to reduce the high costs of data centre ownership. In practice, market realities often channel these ambitions through existing hyperscaler zones in South Africa, which hosts the majority of sub-Saharan Africa's commercial data centre capacity outside Nigeria and Kenya. Asked whether a shared strategy simply swaps Western reliance for dependence on Johannesburg or Cape Town, Chemane rejected the premise of a zero-sum game.

"We are not looking at this from a competition point of view with South Africa," Chemane stated emphatically. "If you are aware of the AI industry, you do not need to concentrate computing power in one single country. You need to distribute it in the region. We want to explore the possibility of Mozambique being another country that can complement the compute power that is in Cape Town or South Africa."

This cooperative positioning is underpinned by the strategic use of national assets. Mozambique has significant power-generating capacity from hydro, solar, and gas — including the Cahora Bassa hydroelectric dam, one of the largest in Africa — along with water resources essential for cooling and a long coastline well suited to submarine fibre optic cables, several of which already land on African shores and route traffic along the continent's eastern seaboard. The goal is to use these natural advantages to attract hyperscalers outside major urban centres, turning the country into a regional digital hub that complements rather than competes with its neighbours.

The vision of shared continental infrastructure is compelling, but execution faces regulatory obstacles. If neighbouring states enact rigid data localisation laws to protect their sovereignty, a shared compute hub becomes legally unworkable for cross-border model training.

Chemane acknowledged this serious friction, pointing to the African Union data governance strategy — a continental framework adopted to harmonise data policies across member states — as the foundational blueprint for regional interoperability. "Data is regarded as the gold of this century, and Africa should take that into consideration when building its AI infrastructure," he said, echoing his consistent public position on digital sovereignty. The framework INTIC is developing permits cross-border data exchange without compromising national security, resting heavily on the principle of citizen consent.

Mozambique is also working to ensure its local innovators are not sidelined by international tech monopolies. The government is cooperating with private legacy telecom operators such as Vodacom to align public policy with commercial and developmental realities. Consultations with Vodacom Mozambique in August highlighted a shared focus on empowering digital entrepreneurship and academia rather than entrenching infrastructure monopolies for telecom giants. The regulator recognises that operators driving digital payment systems, such as the M-Pesa mobile money platform that dominates Mozambican digital transactions, are essential partners in building a robust digital economy.

Writing policy is one thing; supplying raw compute power to local startups is another. Recognising this gap, INTIC has secured support from the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations agency for information and communication technologies, to establish an AI regulatory sandbox — a controlled environment where new technologies can be tested under regulatory supervision before wider rollout. Chemane was clear that sandboxes must be more than empty playgrounds for policy theorists.

"This will be part of our policy that the government will mobilise resources to establish compute, and this compute should be made accessible to the digital entrepreneurship community," he explained. The aim is to nurture national AI models that serve local languages and cultural nuances — areas where foreign-trained models inherently fall short, given that Portuguese-speaking Mozambique's languages are thinly represented in the datasets behind most major AI models. By testing international models in these sandboxes before deployment in sensitive sectors such as healthcare and education, the government seeks to mitigate risks to Mozambican citizens.

This cultural preservation is closely tied to ethics. Mozambique is a pilot country for the adoption of UNESCO AI ethics, drawing on the UN agency's 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence — the first global standard-setting instrument on the subject, endorsed by more than 190 member states — to ensure a human-centred approach to technological advancement. While strict ethical compliance can be costly for early-stage startups, Chemane regards it as non-negotiable. He argued that ethics must be treated not as a regulatory checkbox but as a fundamental dimension of human rights. Achieving this requires combined funding from the public sector, potential sovereign wealth funds, and international development partners so that local innovators are not burdened by compliance costs before they can scale.

The overarching message from INTIC's leadership is one of defiant optimism. Mozambique is structuring its digital future not in isolation but as a critical node in a pan-African network of technological sovereignty. The objective is to use the country's vast natural resources to power a digital economy that prioritises local job creation and data protection over unchecked foreign extraction.

"In the same way we struggled for the independence of our country, we have to struggle now to make sure that Mozambique will continue to be a sovereign state in the digital era," Chemane asserted.

As African nations navigate the complex realities of global AI adoption, Mozambique offers a strategic blueprint that warrants attention. True digital sovereignty, the argument goes, will not be achieved by building defensive regulatory walls but by securing the foundational computing infrastructure that will power the continent for decades to come.