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According to a Mastercard report from 2025, the size of the AI market in Africa last year stood at around $4.51bn, and is expected to more than triple to $16.53bn by 2030. The report ‘Harnessing the Transformative Power of AI in Africa’ describes the technology as a transformative opportunity for the continent, with the potential to address some of its most pressing challenges and, in the process, unlock significant growth.

The progress depends on Africa shaping AI itself, not just adopting what the rest of the world creates. According to Benjamin Rosman, a professor at the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand and a director of the Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery (MIND) Institute, most people who are “doing AI” are using an off-the-shelf tool and applying an African dataset. “The fact that you can do this is awesome,” he says. “And more often than not, it’s the right thing to do because we should be using the best tools out there.