China tightens grip on Nigeria’s tech landscape as the U.S. trails behind
Nigeria’s fast-growing digital economy is being reshaped by a shift where Chinese technology increasingly outweighs the United States(US) influence, particularly in infrastructure, devices, and the physical backbone of the nation’s tech ecosystem.
While American firms remain the dominant force in startup financing and software innovation, Chinese companies are building and supplying the infrastructure that powers Nigeria’s digital future.
Nigeria’s data-centre market, which is the foundation of cloud services, telecoms, and digital platforms, is projected to grow from $278 million in 2024 to $671 million by 2030, according to industry data. The Nigerian government has invited Chinese tech firms to participate directly in this growth, further deepening Beijing’s involvement in critical digital infrastructure.
China holds a larger and more embedded presence in key segments of Nigeria’s tech and digital infrastructure compared to the United States and other countries.
While the US is heavily involved in Nigeria’s vibrant startup/fintech ecosystem via VC funding, China has a strong foothold through major players as Opay, a Chinese-backed fintech company, which was valued at over $1 billion and is a significant player in the mobile money and payment space.
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Opera, a browser company with Chinese ownership, is highly active in the Nigerian consumer tech space. Chinese vendors such as Huawei have become integral to Nigeria’s telecom backbone, supplying network equipment and deploying high-capacity optical systems for operators like MTN Nigeria.
From 400G fibre rollouts to 5G infrastructure, much of the nation’s mobile and internet connectivity rests on Chinese hardware. This infrastructure dominance builds on decades of cooperation.
By 2018, Chinese companies had already invested over $16 billion in Nigeria’s telecom sector, according to the Ministry of Communications. Transsion Holdings, the Chinese parent company of Tecno, Infinix, and itel, commands the Nigerian smartphone market as its affordable, multi-SIM phones with long battery life have become found everywhere across Africa, capturing more than 60 percent of Nigeria’s smartphone market.
For deployment at scale, Huawei created CloudMatrix 384, a rack-scale AI system comprised of 384 Ascend 910C processors. This system spans 16 racks and delivers approximately 300 petaFLOPs in BF16 precision, significantly surpassing Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 system (180 petaFLOPs).
Though less energy-efficient than its Western counterparts, which consume about 559 kilowatts compared to 145 kilowatts for Nvidia’s competing setup, the system leverages China’s relatively low electricity costs to remain economically viable.
Huawei has secured enough wafers to produce over a million Ascend 910C chips between 2023 and 2025, establishing a robust supply chain despite international sanctions. The company expects yield rates to improve from 40 per cent in late 2024 to 60 per cent by 2025, approaching industry-standard levels.
The AI+ Initiative, launched in 2024, represents China’s comprehensive approach to integrating artificial intelligence across its economy. This program promotes the in-depth integration of AI and the real economy by deepening the research and application of AI technology
This initiative follows the model of China’s earlier ‘Internet Plus’ program but focuses specifically on embedding AI capabilities into traditional industries and public services. Early implementation has targeted manufacturing, agriculture, and service sectors to improve production efficiency and product quality while advancing industrial processes toward intelligent development.
In response to US export controls on advanced AI chips, Huawei has developed the Ascend 910C, a graphics processing unit (GPU) that represents China’s most significant domestic chip breakthrough.
The Ascend 910C achieves its performance through clever engineering rather than technological leapfrogging. It combines two 910B processors into a single package through advanced integration techniques, effectively doubling computing power and memory capacity while adding incremental improvements for diverse AI workload support.
Despite manufacturing constraints, the chip delivers performance comparable to Nvidia’s H100 in specific workloads, a significant achievement considering the NVIDIA H100 price and its dominance in the global AI chip market.
China also dominates Nigeria’s solar market, accounting for over 70 per cent of all solar panel shipments into the country, enabling off-grid power solutions that support telecom towers and small businesses; a dominance due to competitive pricing and strong supply chains.
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Chinese apps are also shaping digital culture and commerce as TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, now reaches roughly 37.4 million Nigerian adults, making it one of the country’s top social platforms and a key driver of Nigeria’s fast-rising creator economy.
U.S. influence is the power behind startups because while China builds Nigeria’s digital foundations, the United States remains central to the country’s startup and fintech ecosystem.
According to U.S. Consulate data, U.S. venture capital provides over 60 percent of total startup funding in Nigeria, and roughly 80 percent of Nigerian tech startups are legally incorporated in the United States.
American accelerators such as Y Combinator and Techstars continue to nurture Nigerian founders, while U.S.-backed fintechs like Flutterwave and Paystack (now owned by Stripe) dominate payments innovation.
The U.S. strategy focuses on digital content such as software, platforms, and global scaling, while China dominates the digital pipes that carry the data.
China’s global ambitions in artificial intelligence (AI) amplify its influence across emerging markets like Nigeria.
Beijing aims to become the world leader in AI by 2030, with the sector projected to generate $100 billion in direct revenue and $1 trillion in value across other industries.
Recent breakthroughs such as DeepSeek-R1, an efficient large reasoning model, and Huawei’s Ascend 910C AI chip showcase China’s ability to innovate under sanctions and build domestic AI ecosystems.
Zhu Min, former PBOC deputy governor, predicts this sectoral integration will unleash over 100 DeepSeek-like breakthroughs in the coming 18 months that will fundamentally change the nature and the tech nature of the whole Chinese economy. Hence, the AI+ initiative represents not just a technological program but a comprehensive economic transformation strategy.
China’s strategy is its focus on physical infrastructure such as telecom networks, data centres, and hardware, which is often backed by state financing and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). They provide the fundamental digital pipes for the economy.
Since 2006, the government of the People’s Republic of China has steadily developed a national agenda for artificial intelligence development and has emerged as one of the leading nations in AI research and development.
By 2030, Chinese AI is projected to become a $100 billion industry while creating more than $1 trillion of additional value across other sectors. State-led AI investment funds are actively pouring capital into the development of cutting-edge AI models and applications, including an $8.2 billion AI fund specifically targeting promising startups.
China’s AI industry enjoys significant advantages in energy infrastructure for data centres, driven by aggressive state-backed power expansion that added 429 GW of net new power generation capacity in 2024 alone, more than 15 times the capacity added in the United States during the same period.
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How China’s AI journey began
China’s path to artificial intelligence dominance began decades before its current leadership position, as the earliest roots of Chinese AI research trace back to the 1980s, when the country first established academic programs in computer science.
Initially modest and primarily academic in nature, these early efforts gained momentum as China’s economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping created a foundation for technological advancement.
The seeds of China’s AI revolution were planted during the economic reforms of the late 1970s. As China opened to the outside world, it gradually built the educational and industrial infrastructure necessary for technological development.
Throughout the 1990s, Chinese universities expanded their computer science programs, establishing specialised AI research labs that would eventually produce world-class talent.
The early 2000s marked a significant turning point when Chinese tech companies began forming their own AI research divisions. Baidu established its Institute of Deep Learning in 2013, followed by similar initiatives at Alibaba and Tencent. These corporate investments coincided with growing government interest in AI as a strategic technology.
A decisive moment came in 2016 when AlphaGo, developed by Google’s DeepMind, defeated world champion Go player Ke Jie. This event served as a Sputnik moment for Chinese AI, prompting both government and industry to accelerate investments. Shortly afterward, in 2017, China unveiled its ambitious New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, officially declaring AI a national priority.
Between 2018 and 2022, Chinese AI capabilities advanced rapidly across multiple domains, including computer vision, natural language processing, and autonomous systems.
The COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated this development as AI solutions were deployed for contact tracing, diagnostic assistance, and public health management.
By 2023, Chinese companies had begun releasing large language models (LLMs) that rivaled those from Western competitors. This trend continued into 2024-2025, with models from companies like Baidu, Zhipu AI, and DeepSeek achieving performance benchmarks comparable to or exceeding those of OpenAI and Anthropic.
2025 represented a breakthrough period when Chinese AI models began demonstrating distinctive advantages in efficiency, multilingual capabilities, and integration with hardware systems. This was particularly evident in DeepSeek’s smaller yet highly efficient models and Huawei’s advancements in AI chips designed specifically for Chinese model architectures.
First among China’s recent AI breakthroughs is DeepSeek-R1, a model that has stunned global observers with its remarkable efficiency-to-performance ratio. Released in January 2025, this large reasoning model (LRM) achieved performance comparable to leading Western models while requiring dramatically fewer resources for training and inference.
The secret behind DeepSeek-R1’s efficiency lies in its Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. Despite containing 671 billion total parameters, the model activates only 37 billion parameters per query.
This approach enables sophisticated reasoning capabilities without proportional increases in computational costs. According to the company’s claims, DeepSeek trained R1 in just 55 days using approximately 2,000 Nvidia H800 GPUs at a cost of merely $5.60 million.
DeepSeek-R1 demonstrated exceptional capabilities in reasoning and complex problem-solving. The model achieved 97.3 percent accuracy on the MATH-500 benchmark and 79.8 percent on AIME 2024, outperforming many competitors in structured reasoning tasks.
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Its fully open-source nature under the MIT license has enabled global adoption, with the model soaring to the top of download charts on Hugging Face hours after its release.
Recognising that AI development requires massive computational resources, China launched the ‘Eastern Data, Western Computing’ initiative in 2022. This national project strategically redistributes digital infrastructure by building data centers in energy-rich western regions to process information collected in data-rich eastern provinces.
The initiative designates ten data center clusters within eight national hub nodes, including locations in Guizhou, Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Ningxia, and Chengdu-Chongqing. By June 2024, China had achieved 246 EFLOP/s of total compute capacity and aims to reach 300 EFLOP/s by 2025.
Government investment has been substantial, with approximately $6 billion in direct funding leveraging over $27 billion in total investment by the end of 2024. These resources support not just traditional computing but specialised AI infrastructure, including custom chip deployments from companies like Baidu, Alibaba, and Huawei.
