At Dubai AI Week, excitement centered on new AI models. Yet one crucial fact went under-discussed: all these digital innovations run on physical infrastructure – especially data centers – that require enormous energy and strategic investment. Without urgent attention to climate-resilient, energy-secure, and well-placed data centers, the promise of AI at scale will remain out of reach. The Global South must not remain mere consumers in the AI revolution, but help build that backbone themselves.
By James Saruchera, co-founder, of AFRIK
The hidden backbone of AI: energy-hungry data centers
AI doesn’t live in a vacuum; it lives on servers. Every AI query or blockchain transaction ultimately runs in a sprawling data center. These facilities form the AI infrastructure underpinning our digital world, but they come with a voracious appetite for electricity. Data centers already consume roughly 1–2% of global electricity and this share is rising fast. Goldman Sachs forecasts data center power demand will surge by 165% by 2030 due to AI’s growth.
This energy intensity makes data centers both critical and challenging. However, running those server farms carries a heavy carbon footprint and demands robust grids. Extreme weather and grid instability pose real threats: in 2022, a heatwave in London shut down Google’s and Oracle’s cloud servers for hours. The bottom line is that AI needs data centers, and data centers need abundant, reliable energy.
Digital sovereignty and the geography of AI
Beyond the technical issues, there is a geopolitical angle – data centers are strategic assets, yet their distribution is highly uneven. North America, Europe and East Asia host most of the world’s hyperscale data centers, while data centers in Africa and similar regions are few. The entire African continent has only about 140 data centers in total, and many countries have none at all. This means many African and emerging economy users must send their data and AI computations to servers overseas, raising latency and cost while compromising sovereignty. No wonder digital sovereignty is becoming a priority. To truly participate in the AI age, countries need control over the ground that AI runs on. We believe that emerging regions must become providers of AI infrastructure, not just consumers, to avoid a new AI divide.
Africa and the GCC: New frontiers for AI infrastructure
Africa and the GCC are uniquely positioned to lead an infrastructure shift. Energy security is a major advantage: these regions boast huge renewable energy potential – both are solar-rich. Tapping this potential can power green, low-cost data centers. Many countries are already investing heavily in solar and wind projects. Locating AI data centers near abundant clean energy isn’t just climate-friendly; it ensures a stable power supply insulated from global fuel price swings.
Another advantage is booming digital demand. Africa’s internet economy is one of the fastest-growing, and its data center market is expected to roughly double by the late 2020s. The GCC economies, meanwhile, are investing billions in tech hubs, smart cities, and AI research – all of which need robust backend infrastructure. This growth in digital services creates a strong business case for local data centers.
Crucially, many countries in Africa and the Middle East are geopolitically non-aligned. They can collaborate with partners East and West and serve as neutral, reliable hosts for global data. In an era of tech nationalism, having data hubs in politically stable, non-aligned regions is strategic. Neutral ground can attract cloud and AI investments from all sides. These regions can become natural locations for hosting and distributing AI workloads globally.
Financing the infrastructure revolution: A Web3 approach
One challenge to building data centers in emerging markets is financing. This is where new models – including Decentralised finance (DeFi) and Decentralised Physical Infrastructure (DePin)– come into play. [pullquote] Traditional funding for large data centers comes from governments or tech giants. But decentralized finance (DeFi) and blockchain technology are opening novel ways to fund infrastructure by tapping global communities of investors. Our platform AFRIK is pioneering ways to crowdfund data center projects using Web3, allowing broad participation in funding this infrastructure.
For example, blockchain technology makes it possible for individuals anywhere to fund solar farms and mini grids. This approach creates a form of decentralised digital sovereignty, with infrastructure owned by the community rather than a few big players. These Web3 models are nascent, but they can complement traditional capital and speed up infrastructure build-out where needed.
Without climate-resilient, energy-secure data centers in more regions, AI’s goals will falter. Countries that secure sustainable, sovereign compute capacity will hold a strategic edge. We must match our ambition in the cloud with equal ambition on the ground.
