South Africa 'too dependent' on US, China

south african draft The AI ​​policy document – ​​gazetted last week by the Department of Communications and Digital Technology – contains a clear admission that the country's reliance on US and Chinese hardware creates a strategic vulnerability that becomes harder to manage due to the intense rivalry between the two powers.

“Dependence on foreign infrastructure compromises the security of sensitive South African data. Therefore, there is a need to invest in local infrastructure and related data sovereignty measures to protect national interests and plan to reduce the country's existing hardware dependence on the US and China,” the document said.

One way to reduce data sovereignty risks is to create more local infrastructure to ensure that sensitive data is not stored on foreign servers. In his budget speech in February, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana for the first time put data center infrastructure on the same level as power, ports and transport networks.

This policy change is partly aimed at attracting more investment. But even if it manages to ensure high levels of data sovereignty, the hardware used in those data centers must come from somewhere.

The hardware concerns fall within a broader and accelerating phenomenon: the fragmentation of global technology standards along geopolitical lines. What began as a trade dispute between the US and China over semiconductors has turned into something structurally more significant – the gradual emergence of parallel technology ecosystems, one based on the US and its allies and the other focused on China.

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The implications run deeper than chip supply. They extend to networking equipment, cloud infrastructure, AI training hardware and, increasingly, software and model layers built on top of them. The development of its own AI silicon by Huawei Technologies in response to US export controls, and the emergence of domestically developed Chinese big language models running on that silicon, is the most visible manifestation of a stack that is actively falling apart.

For countries in the middle – and South Africa sits exactly in that category – risk being forced to choose, or being unknowingly locked into an ecosystem before fully understanding the consequences of that choice.

Reading: South Africa's draft AI policy is a bureaucrat's dream

In March, the US banned the import and sale of new foreign-made Internet routers over national security concerns, widening the geopolitical divide from the infrastructure to consumer hardware markets. Other sectors are also in danger.

At Mobile World Congress in Spain in March, GSMA MTN Group Vice President and CEO Ralph Mupita warned that the mobile industry Faced with division of technology standards As the industry moves towards 6G connectivity. According to Mupita, fragmentation in supply chains and the potential contraction of global economies of scale could put smaller economies like Africa at risk of falling further behind in access to digital infrastructure and connectivity.

“A big area of ​​debate among GSMA board members is the concept of digital sovereignty and whether it is an oxymoron or a contradiction in the world today, which is rapidly moving towards de-globalization and moving towards where you can have split standards for 6G,” Mupita said.

For South African enterprises and public institutions that are currently purchasing AI infrastructure, the question of segmentation presents a dilemma. The decision now has to be made on which cloud platforms to standardize, which networking vendors to deploy, and which AI model providers to integrate with, along with long-term switching costs. If fragmentation in global standards continues, those decisions will increasingly have geopolitical dimensions that procurement policy is not currently equipped to deal with.

The Minister of Communications speaking to Newsroom Africa on Tuesday soli maltsi said People from all walks of life are impacted by AI, he said, adding that collaboration between government, business and the general public is key to ensuring that South Africa develops a solid AI policy.

“Each sector has had a unique impact and reaction to AI, and we want to take advantage of the lessons that have become evident in those sectors and incorporate them into a policy that is fair and practical and that gives society a solid foundation. We are dealing with a technology that is rapidly evolving and, if truth be told, we are a little late on the journey to react to it,” Malatsi said.

The draft AI policy is open for public comments till June 10. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media