Recently The New York Times reported the following:
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| (Source: The NYT) |
China’s A.I. Is Surging Across Africa. That Should Worry Silicon Valley (2/3)
In African tech hubs, developers are picking China’s
cheap, freely available artificial intelligence models over more powerful U.S.
ones.
The NYT - By Paul MozurAdam Satariano and Aaron Krolik (Paul Mozur and Adam Satariano reported from Nairobi, Kenya, and Aaron Krolik from New York.)
Aug. 5, 2026
(continue from part 1)
Yet Africa’s experience shows the global A.I. competition is
now a two-horse race.
Kamal Budhabhatti, the chief executive of Craft Silicon, a Nairobi banking software company, feels the pull of both sides. He recently rebuilt his firm’s tech systems with Claude Code, Anthropic’s programming tool. A 10-person team finished in half the time a project that once took 100 engineers. The bill was high, he said, but the speed was worth it.
Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, also came calling with “some very unbelievable incentives” to switch to Chinese systems, he said, including a year of free computing and a trip to the company’s headquarters.
“It’s very hard to say no,” Mr. Budhabhatti said.
The China Model
About 50 miles southeast of Nairobi, one of Kenya’s biggest
collaborations with Chinese technology sits half-finished on the savanna.
Konza Technopolis, a planned city, was announced 18 years ago as Kenya’s answer to Silicon Valley. Hopefully branded the Silicon Savannah, it is now a grid of empty boulevards and skeletal buildings, watched over by a powerful Chinese surveillance system.
It would look like a failed experiment but for one slate-gray building behind an electric fence. Financed by Chinese loans and built by Huawei, the site is a data center that runs computing for Kenya’s government.
For two decades, Chinese firms have wired Africa’s telecommunications networks and paved its roads. M-Pesa, Kenya’s celebrated mobile-money system, runs on Huawei technology.
These tech ties gave China a foothold in the continent, which it is using to sell A.I. One project advertised at Konza will use technology from the Chinese A.I. firm DeepSeek to combat telecom fraud.
Locked out of advanced chips because of U.S. export controls, Chinese companies could not outspend Silicon Valley. So they gave their A.I. models away as open source, hoping to pull people from U.S. rivals.
At first, it seemed a losing bet. The United States dominated open-source A.I. Meta offered a model called Llama that developers used worldwide. But after some stumbles, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, turned more to closed models.
“It left a huge hole,” said Lucas Atkins, co-founder of Arcee A.I., an American start-up that builds open models. “It allowed the Chinese to explode into the vacuum.”
Breakthroughs came quickly. In December 2024, a DeepSeek A.I. model matched the best models at a fraction of the cost. Last month, the Chinese A.I. lab Moonshot AI released a model with coding abilities approaching the leading American systems.
In Kenya, developers embraced Chinese models.
Michael Michie builds A.I. systems for Kenyan banks and government agencies at EverseTech. His customers are price sensitive, so he makes almost everything on Chinese open-source models. Businesses want the cheapest way to use the technology, not the most advanced, he said.
“I don’t think people should worry so much about who built it,” he said. “The focus should be, does it deliver the capability you need?”
Sentai Simons, a start-up founder in Nairobi, downloaded Chinese models to build a product that turned paper legal records into searchable databases. He customized the system with about one million legal files.
His product, JibuDocs, ended up about 140 gigabytes in size — smaller than many iPhones — and cost about $25,000 to create and maintain. Using a service like Anthropic’s Claude, he said, would have cost more than $1 million.
“It’s absolutely the difference between having a business and not having a business,” he said.
Many developers said Chinese companies treated them like a priority, while U.S. firms were hardly present.
Ahmet Acar, a former principal adviser at Amazon Web Services who lives in Nairobi, said joining a developer program from Anthropic required a lengthy screening. Alibaba’s took minutes.
“With the Chinese, it was like: ‘Hey, are you able to do this? Are you located here? All right, man, go have fun,’” he said.
(to be continued in part 3)
Translation
中國的人工智能正在非洲迅速崛起，這應該引起矽谷的擔憂（2/3）
在非洲的科技中心，開發者們正在選擇中國廉價且免費的人工智能模型，而不是功能更強大的美國模型
（接上文）
然而，非洲的經驗表明，全球人工智能競爭如今已演變為一場雙雄爭霸。
內羅比銀行軟件公司Craft Silicon的執行長Kamal Budhabhatti感受到了雙方的拉鋸。他最近使用Anthropic公司的程式設計工具Claude Code重建了公司的技術系統。一個10人的團隊僅用一半的時間就完成了原本需要100名工程師才能完成的專案。他說，費用很高，但速度快是得值的。
他還說，中國科技巨頭華為也主動聯繫他們，提供了“一些令人難以置信的優惠”，鼓勵他們改用中國系統，包括一年的免費運算服務和一次參觀華為總部的機會。
Budhabhatti先生說: 「這是很難拒絕的」。
中國模式
在內羅比東南約50英里處，肯亞與中國科技公司合作的最大計劃之一，如今卻荒廢在只有少量樹木的草原之上。
Konza Technopolis是個規劃中的城市，18年前宣佈建設，旨在成為肯亞的「矽谷」。它曾被寄予厚望，希望被譽為 “矽谷草原” ，但如今卻只是一片空蕩蕩的林蔭大道和只有骨架的建築，被強大的中國監控系統監視著。
這看起來像是一項失敗的實驗，但電動圍欄後面有一棟石板灰色的建築物。這地方是個由中國貸款融資的數據中心，由華為承建，為肯亞政府提供運算服務。
二十年來，中國企業為非洲的電信網絡和道路建設做出了巨大貢獻。肯亞著名的行動支付系統M-Pesa就採用了華為的技術。
這些技術聯繫使中國在非洲大陸站穩了腳跟，並以此為據點推銷人工智能技術。在Konza大會上展示的一個項目將利用中國人工智能公司DeepSeek的技術來打擊電信詐欺。
由於美國的出口管制，中國企業無法取得先進晶片，也無法在資金上與矽谷匹敵。因此，他們將人工智能模式開源，希望以此吸引美國競爭對手的人才。
起初，這似乎是一場注定失敗的賭博。美國在開源人工智能領域佔據主導地位。 Meta公司提供了一個名為Llama的模型，並被世界各地的開發者使用。但在經歷了一些挫折之後，Meta的執行長朱克伯格開始更多地轉向封閉式模型。
致力於建立開源模型的美國初創公司 Arcee A.I. 的聯合創始人Lucas Atkins 說: 「這留下了一個巨大的空檔」;「這讓中國企業得以迅速填補這一真空」。
突破性進展來得很快。 2024 年 12 月，DeepSeek A.I. 的一款模型能以一小部分的成本擁有可與最佳型號模型匹配的效果。上個月，中國人工智能實驗室 Moonshot AI 發佈了一款編碼能力接近美國領先系統的模型。DeepSeek A.I. 模型以一小部分的成本媲美最優秀的模型
在肯亞，開發者們接受了中國模型。
Michael Michie 在 EverseTech 公司為肯亞的銀行和政府機構建立人工智能系統。他的客戶對價格非常敏感，因此他幾乎所有系統都基於中國的開源模型。他說，企業想要的是最經濟的技術使用方式，而不是最先進的技術。
他說:「我認為人們不應該過分在意是誰開發的」 ;「重點應該是，它是否能提供你所需的功能？」。
內羅比的創業家Sentai Simons借鑒了中國的模式，開發了一款可以將紙本法律記錄轉換為可搜尋資料庫的產品。他用大約一百萬份法律文件對系統進行了度身定做。
他的產品 JibuDocs 最終大小約為 140 GB - 比許多 iPhone 都小 - 開發和維護成本約為 25,000 美元。他說，如果使用像 Anthropic 的 Claude 這樣的服務，成本將超過 100 萬美元。
他說:「「這絕對是有生意和沒生意之間的差別」。
很多開發者說中國公司把他們當成優先考慮的對象，而美國公司幾乎不存在。
居住在內羅比的亞馬遜網路服務（AWS）前首席顧問Ahmet Acar表示，去加入 Anthropic 的開發者的計劃需要經過漫長的篩選，而阿里巴巴的篩選只需幾分鐘。
他說:「跟中國人合作時，感覺就像是：『喂，你能做到嗎？你在本地嗎？好吧，兄弟，一齊嚟喇』」。
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