Artificial Intelligence (AI) dominated the agenda at this year’s of GITEX Global at the Dubai World Trade Centre. Organisers say this year’s gathering drew record participation, including more than 6,800 exhibitors, 2,000 startups, and 1,200 investors from 180 countries.
Among the most anticipated sessions was a joint appearance by OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman (pictured), who joined virtually, and Peng Xiao, Group CEO of Abu Dhabi-based G42, who took to the main stage in front of capacity crowds. The organisations that the two tech leaders head are both at the forefront of the global AI revolution. They are also partners in the UAE’s most ambitious AI infrastructure initiative yet: Stargate UAE. This is a planned 5 GW AI supercomputing campus in Abu Dhabi that will be among the world’s largest when complete.
G42 announced during GITEX that the first 200 megawatts of capacity for Stargate UAE are expected to come online in 2026. The project’s first phase is being developed in partnership with OpenAI, Nvidia, Cisco, Oracle, and Japan’s SoftBank. It is part of the UAE’s bid to diversify its oil-based economy and attract investments in tech and AI, leveraging its close US ties to access advanced American technologies.
Reflecting on the UAE’s emergence as a global AI leader, Altman and Xiao discussed how countries around the world can move from being early adopters of AI to what they described as “AI-native societies”.
Make AI a top three government agenda
“In my mind there are four major factors for a nation to succeed in being AI native. You must have a strong political leadership. The push must come from the top down; it needs to be a top three, maybe even top one priority, for the government agenda,” Xiao said.
“You need to educate your population, your whole society, to embrace AI. Infrastructure is key… Sam and his team decided back in May this year to make UAE the first international site for Stargate development. The fourth factor for success is global partnership,” Xiao continued.
Altman said the UAE’s ascendancy on the global tech scene offers other countries a roadmap for successful AI adoption. “We think every country is going to need to have an AI strategy, and it’s got to be a top priority for the national leadership. The leadership of the UAE on this has been incredible to see. I hope that it can serve as an example for the rest of the world about what it looks like for a forward thinking country to really embrace AI and say ‘this is going to be an important part of our future’,” he said.
Altman’s call for countries to craft national AI strategies has been well heeded in Africa. Ethiopia, Nigeria, Libya, Zambia and Mauritania published frameworks on their national AI strategies in 2024, while Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Namibia, Lesotho and Tanzania followed in 2025 with their own plans or drafts. In total, at least fifteen countries now have national AI strategies, in addition to two continental frameworks.
Despite the strong initiative and palpable ambition, investments in AI in Africa continue to trail other regions by a considerable margin. The continent hosts less than 1% of the world’s data centres, and only around 3% of global AI talent is based in Africa. Without an uptick in investments, experts fear that AI risks becoming another imported technology to which Africa must adapt – rather than a field in which the continent actively contributes, innovates and leads.
Promoting fluency in AI
Philip Thigo, Kenya’s special envoy on technology, argues that to attract AI investments to their countries, “leaders need to be fluent around AI”. There is still a knowledge gap that must be bridged, he contends.
“The first mistake is that people (in African governments) think AI is an ICT issue. It is not. It is a whole-of-government issue. A lot of African countries negotiating on this issue went from an ICT perspective, which only focused on the applications … then you forget there is an infrastructure piece, an energy bit, a talent and skilling bit. There are also the geopolitical issues and the resourcing and finance bits,” he tells African Business on the sidelines of GITEX.
“The second issue is understanding where you are in the AI value chain because not everyone can have data centres. People want data centres then realise ‘you don’t have the energy, you don’t have the water for cooling …. You need to understand where you are and where your advantage is,” Thigo notes.
He says that Kenya is training civil servants to better understand AI and its applications, arguing that this should be standard practice for any government keen on attracting investments in AI. “In terms of public sector training and skilling, there is a centre of excellence at the Kenya School of Government. They have already trained 7000 civil servants over the past year. We did this in partnership with the UNDP (UN Development Programme) and are looking to scale it.”
Safeguarding African sovereignty
Thigo says that global partners like Microsoft, Oracle and G42, among others, are helping Kenya build out its AI infrastructure. However, while global partnerships remain essential to overcoming resource constraints, he insists that Africa must simultaneously invest in its own AI infrastructure to avoid long-term dependency.
“The biggest risk for me is if we don’t build it ourselves… how do we get countries in the continent to be builders and not just users of AI. It’s dangerous when someone else determines how you consume knowledge, how you produce knowledge, and how your knowledge is perceived,” he says.
Thigo contends that public-private-partnerships (PPPs) could help Africa overcome financial constraints in its quest to build its own AI infrastructure. “We want to get the African private sector to step up. It is going to be very important that Africa does not build AI on loans, because if someone takes your data centres as collateral your sovereignty is gone. Data centres we have to do on our own.”
Averting the risk of an ‘AI divide’
AI adoption in many advanced economies is growing at a blistering pace, creating the risk of an “AI divide” that leaves poorer economies on the continent in a perennial game of catch up.
“AI has gone from something people played with to something people build with,” Altman said, revealing that ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, had surpassed 800m active weekly users in October.
“We are still fairly early in that journey and we will see people doing really remarkable things in the coming one or two years. The best thing we can do to ensure we do not have an AI divide is to make AI available and cheap, to teach people how to use it, to have every country embrace it,” he noted.
Grand ambition is equally critical for success, Xiao argued. Countries that want to lead on AI must dare to dream big.
“As we talk about the future success of AI, the greatest failure today will be the failure of ambition. We have to think bigger, with a new paradigm. This is not just another evolutionary step, it requires a mindset shift.”
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