South Africa will not align with either Washington or Beijing in artificial intelligence, Communications Minister Solly Malatsi says. Malatsi rejected the central premise of a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report, The Great Divide: How the US and China Are Splitting the AI World, which argued that the window for middle-income nations to hedge between competing American and Chinese tech stacks is rapidly closing.
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The BCG report warned that the US and China are building incompatible technology stacks across hardware, cloud layers, and AI models. For instance, production code written for Nvidia’s CUDA environment cannot easily run on Huawei’s Ascend silicon without extensive rewriting for its proprietary CANN framework.
Despite South Africa joining the China-led World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation (WAICO), Malatsi emphasized that multilateral memberships carry no binding commitments regarding technical standards or state procurement. Instead, South African public procurement will remain anchored in existing laws prioritizing value-for-money, security, interoperability, and open standards to prevent vendor lock-in regardless of an OEM’s country of origin.
Both global superpowers are aggressively expanding their digital footprints across South Africa:
See also
- China: Huawei is pitching integrated enterprise AI solutions while hosting DeepSeek models optimized for its Ascend chips.
- United States: Microsoft has committed over R25 billion to local cloud and AI infrastructure, complemented by hyper-scale cloud regions from AWS, Google, and Oracle, as well as Nvidia-powered data facilities.
However, pursuing non-alignment presents practical vulnerabilities. In June 2026, South African users lost access to Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 model for three weeks when the US Department of Commerce ordered a foreign access suspension over domestic vulnerability concerns. The incident demonstrated that unilateral regulatory decisions in Washington or Beijing can disrupt local operations regardless of South Africa’s neutral procurement policies.
