Sourced records of Chinese AI deployments across the Global South and the Middle East

In 2019, Huawei Cloud launched a local hyperscale cloud data center in South Africa. By 2024, it had established three data center availability zones/locations in Johannesburg, providing cloud and AI computing services for government, finance, education, telecom, media, e-commerce, and other industries. The company regards growing AI adoption as an important driver of cloud spending by South African enterprises.

Huawei Cloud has expanded its local cloud business in Kenya since around 2020. In 2025, it worked with Kenya's Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy to advance the Kenya AI & Cloud Pioneer Initiative, promoting AI and cloud services across government, finance, telecom, media, e-commerce, and other industries. Huawei Cloud Stack 8.5 can deploy 120+ cloud services and AI capabilities locally.

Huawei and Ethio Telecom jointly advanced the EM 2.0 digital-intelligent transformation. In 2021, Huawei supported the launch of the Telebirr mobile payment service, followed by development of the telecloud sovereign cloud and deployment of xCare/FinCare digital operations platforms that use network, user, and market big data for AI modeling and inference. These platforms support marketing, agent-network management, risk control, and operational optimization.

In 2026, ZTE and MTN South Africa validated and expanded AIR RAN EnergyTurbo on a commercial network in Cape Town. EnergyTurbo is an AI-native closed-loop energy intelligence solution that predicts load based on traffic patterns, site energy strategies, and real-time service demand, then dynamically controls base-station energy saving to reduce power consumption while maintaining user experience.

Alibaba Cloud entered the South African market in 2022 through local partner BCX. In 2025, it launched a South African Edge Node Service (ENS) node, deploying computing, storage, and networking capabilities in ISP data centers closer to end users to serve low-latency and local-data-processing needs in e-commerce, gaming, video, finance, manufacturing, and other industries.

Alibaba Cloud will provide core digital infrastructure for the Dakar 2026 Summer Youth Olympic Games, using the Apsara Stack private cloud to support event planning, operations, logistics, and post-Games services, while using AI and cloud technologies for a digital torch and interactive experiences. This will be the first Olympic sporting event held in Africa.

Around 2018–2019, XAG's P Series plant-protection UAS were deployed in Zambia by local service provider Sunagri Investment Zambia Limited to control fall armyworm across roughly 200 hectares on three commercial farms. Operations were timed for after sunset to target the nocturnal pest, and precision spraying reduced reliance on manual backpack application.

In 2018, CloudWalk signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with the Zimbabwean government to develop a large-scale facial-recognition system/facial database and apply the technology to smart finance and public-security scenarios such as airports, railway stations, and bus stations. Public reporting also noted that the system would need to adapt to Zimbabwean facial characteristics, raising issues around local facial-data collection and model training.

PalmPay launched in Nigeria in 2019 as a mass-market mobile-payments and digital-finance platform. Company management has disclosed the use of AI to flag unusual transactions, identify potential fraud risks, and perform facial recognition, while compliance, risk-control, and technical teams manually review AI alerts and continuously train the systems.

OPay operates a mobile-payment and digital-finance platform in Nigeria. In 2026, the company disclosed that its risk-control system uses machine learning, behavioral analytics, and facial verification: high-risk behaviors such as large transfers, new devices/unfamiliar locations, and unusual transaction times trigger additional verification, while Anti-Scam Shield identifies and blocks suspicious transfers before funds leave the network.

In August 2018, Huawei Nigeria and Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) jointly established the Huawei ICT Academy; in 2022, ABU became Nigeria's first Huawei ICT Academy Support Center. Courses cover AI, cloud, storage, big data, computing, networking, and security, and Huawei also provides online lab environments for AI and cloud.

During Tanzania's 2025 general election, TikTok worked with the Independent Electoral Commission of Tanzania and Nukta Fact to launch a Swahili Election Center and partnered with Code for Africa on fact-checking. The platform requires creators to label realistic AI-generated content and uses C2PA Content Credentials to help identify AIGC generated on external platforms.

In June-July 2020, XAG P20 agricultural drones ran a commercial sugarcane-ripening trial at Seafield Farm in the Midlands South region of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, applying ripener along pre-set autonomous flight routes. Drone-ripened areas showed a 1% increase in recoverable value versus helicopter-applied ripener. The farm owner had purchased XAG drones for his own 200ha cane field and for neighbouring growers.

Hikvision built remote video-surveillance and video-content-analysis (VCA) solutions for some substations of South Africa's national power utility Eskom. Intelligent perimeter/line detection and centralized monitoring identify theft, vandalism, and other risks to protect critical electricity infrastructure.

On 10 December 2024 Huawei launched Nigeria's first hyperscale local cloud in Lagos, running on Tier 3+ data centres with about 15 ms latency and keeping customer data inside Nigeria. Huawei Cloud presented Huawei Cloud Stack 8.5, cloud-native databases and Pangu models. On 27 August 2026, at the Huawei Nigeria AI & Cloud Summit in Lagos, Huawei launched Agentic AI Cloud on the same local cloud for finance, carrier, internet and government customers.