An African Perspective for Building AI for Global South | AI Summit Special

About this episode

This episode features a discussion on AI infrastructure in Africa and the unique challenges faced in the Global South.

In this episode of Interpreting India, Nidhi Singh is joined by Raymond Ononiwu, founder and CEO of Horus Labs, for a conversation that cuts through the noise around compute, data centres, and AI infrastructure to ask a more fundamental question: who is this all actually being built for? Raymond brings the perspective of someone building AI infrastructure on the ground in Africa, and his account of what the global AI conversation is still getting wrong is both practical and pointed. This episode explores: What is compute, why has it become a strategic resource, and does every country actually need to be training frontier models? What does AI infrastructure really require on the ground, and why is building it in the Global South a fundamentally different challenge from building it in Shenzhen? If you are a country in sub-Saharan Africa trying to build an AI strategy, what should you invest in and what should you ignore entirely? Are the global conversations happening around AI, including at the India AI Impact Summit, actually reflecting what builders on the ground need?

People in this episode

Host: Nidhi Singh

Guest: Raymond Ononiwu

Topics covered

• AI infrastructure
• Global South
• sub-Saharan Africa
• AI strategy
• compute resources
• frontier models

Keywords

• AI
• infrastructure
• Global South
• compute
• sub-Saharan Africa
• AI strategy
• frontier models

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Horus Labs

Places: Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Global South, Shenzhen

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