【By Observer Net, Qi Qian】
After entering 2025, the development of global artificial intelligence (AI) tools has advanced rapidly. At the same time, Western enterprises in the U.S. and Europe view China as a "fictitious enemy" and try to compete with Chinese AI models such as DeepSeek and Qwen for global leadership.
At the height of this competitive situation, some American media have noticed that the West has "lost ground" on the African continent.
"Chinese AI models are rising in Africa," Bloomberg reported on October 23, stating that Western companies are focused on securing high-profit corporate contracts, while Chinese companies have taken a different approach—low cost and high efficiency have enabled hundreds of millions of Africans to access AI technology and empower African startups to design products for users. A representative from an African company said that Chinese models provided them with "flexibility, lower costs, and the potential to build local data sovereignty."
The report mentioned that earlier this year, in a conference room at Qhala startup headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, a group of managers from various African tech companies gathered to listen to a speech about the potential of AI. The speaker was Harrison Li, Chief Solution Architect for Huawei's Yunnan Department in Africa, and the topic was the globally well-known AI participant, DeepSeek.
In his speech, Li pointed out that China's DeepSeek can match Silicon Valley's OpenAI at a low cost and can run on cheaper hardware. After the speech, he said, "DeepSeek is so popular here; no one wants to talk about anything else."
Bloomberg called this a perfect sales pitch. In most of Africa outside of South Africa, computing resources are often expensive and scarce. Making AI more affordable and energy-efficient will make this hottest global technology accessible to more people and empower African startups to design products for users.
Shikoh Gitau, CEO of Qhala, is overseeing the development of the company's AI-powered chatbot. Last year, she tried multiple Western models, including Claude, Gemini, and Llama, each of which impressed her, but none were suitable for a young enterprise focused on cost.
Until January of this year, DeepSeek emerged.
"The first time I heard about DeepSeek, I started celebrating," Gitau praised its affordable price and revealed that she quickly migrated Qhala's AI chatbot to the DeepSeek system.
On September 29, the DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp model was officially released and open-sourced.
Bloomberg said that now, the West focuses most of its attention on Western tech companies competing for high-profit corporate contracts in the U.S. and the Middle East, but pays little attention to AI development on the African continent. This meeting in Nairobi vividly demonstrates the different path taken by Chinese companies.
The report concluded that U.S. companies like OpenAI almost completely focus on proprietary AI—software, training data, and algorithms are entirely controlled by the parent company, and users pay to access them. In contrast, Chinese companies like Huawei and Alibaba are developing open-source AI models—available for free and modification, allowing companies to build products without expensive licenses, which is highly attractive to African startups and innovation centers.
This made Bloomberg think of China's "Belt and Road Initiative" and the panic it causes among the West due to China's increasing global influence. Subsequently, the report unsurprisingly hyped up the "China threat," repeating a series of clichés such as "privacy protection," "debt traps," and "government subsidies," starting to smear Chinese AI models in advance.
The report also acknowledged that in Africa, similar to Latin America and Southeast Asia, China has a backend advantage. While American tech companies target wealthy regions, Chinese enterprises attract emerging market consumers with low costs and active marketing. Now, Chinese companies dominate in areas such as data centers, 5G wireless systems and fiber optic networks, smartphones, and application software in Africa.
For many African tech entrepreneurs, lightweight, low-cost AI models from China are the best choice.
"Across the entire continent of Africa, every small team is working to fine-tune DeepSeek for local applications," said Vukosi Marivate, professor of computer science at the University of Pretoria and co-founder of the research laboratory Lelapa AI, "we will see results later this year."
On September 24, the flagship model Qwen3-Max of Alibaba was unveiled. Oriental IC
Olubayo Adekanmbi, co-founder and CEO of Nigerian startup EqualyzAI, said, "Chinese models provide them with flexibility, lower costs, and the potential for local data sovereignty." He mentioned that in Nigeria, models from OpenAI and Gemini are difficult to popularize due to high costs, licensing restrictions, and lack of local language customization.
According to the introduction, unlike proprietary models that charge licensing and infrastructure usage fees, DeepSeek customers pay based on the computation performed by the model, and the price advantage is significant. Pricing is based on tokens, which are words or small text blocks processed by the model to generate new content. Huawei provides DeepSeek users with 2 million free tokens per day.
For example, DeepSeek charges 27 cents for processing 1 million query tokens and $1.10 for generating 1 million response tokens. OpenAI's GPT-4o charges $5 for the same query tokens and $15 for the same response tokens.
Adekanmbi said that for startups like EqualyzAI in Africa, DeepSeek is "orders of magnitude cheaper than competitors."
Gitau further pointed out that there are many reasons why Silicon Valley models are unsuitable for African users. AI models made in the U.S. require more tokens to process foreign languages and unfamiliar words, thus making the computational cost higher for non-English users. She said, "In the worldview of San Francisco, the African context is erased."
According to the report, a large number of African startups are vying to use Chinese AI models. In addition to the popular DeepSeek, the Nigerian education startup Cereloop has been fine-tuning Alibaba's Qwen model to build AI products that students can use offline to learn science and mathematics.
Regarding the so-called "data privacy" risks that the West has hyped, Lacina Kone, director and CEO of Smart Africa, stated directly, "Western model manufacturers cannot convince us to believe this." It is understood that "Smart Africa" is a coalition composed of African countries, international organizations, and global private sector participants aimed at advancing Africa's digital agenda.
According to Xinhua News Agency, in July this year, Premier Li Qiang attended the opening ceremony of the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai and delivered a speech.
Premier Li pointed out that artificial intelligence should become an international public product that benefits humanity. China's "Artificial Intelligence +" initiative is being deeply implemented, and it is willing to share development experience and technical products, helping countries around the world, especially those in the Global South, to strengthen their capabilities, so that the achievements of artificial intelligence development can better benefit the globe.
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Original: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7564301125236408858/
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