When the United States blacklisted Huawei in 2019, it thought it was administering a death blow to China’s most important technology company. What it actually did was light a fire under China’s entire semiconductor industry.
By 2024, Huawei had launched advanced smartphones featuring domestically produced chips. By 2026, China’s semiconductor manufacturing equipment companies were ranked among the top ten globally. SMIC — China’s leading chipmaker was producing chips at 7 nanometre class using techniques that the US had specifically tried to block. And Huawei’s AI accelerator chip, the Ascend 910C, was competing credibly with mid-tier Nvidia GPUs across Chinese enterprises.
The US strategy of containment through export controls has not failed entirely. China still cannot produce the most advanced chips, the bleeding-edge semiconductors that power the world’s largest AI training runs. But it has made far more progress than Washington anticipated. And the result is not a world where one side has won the tech war. It is a world fracturing into two separate technology ecosystems ,one centred on the US and its allies, the other centred on China. A world of two internets, two AI stacks, two semiconductor supply chains.
For Africa, a continent with 54 countries, 1.4 billion people, and technology infrastructure that is still being built, this fracture is not an abstract geopolitical story. It is a decision that will need to be made, explicitly or by default, with consequences that will last decades.
“The world is fracturing into two technological ecosystems. Africa has not yet chosen sides. The countries that navigate this most carefully will be the ones that benefit most from both.” — Geopolitics analyst, 2026
$53B
US CHIPS Act investment in domestic semiconductor manufacturing
70%
China’s target for semiconductor self-sufficiency driving its entire industrial policy
40%
Drop in US-China R&D partnerships since 2018, per MIT study
$30.5B
Chinese construction contracts signed with African nations in H1 2025 alone
How the Tech Cold War Started
The US-China technology rivalry did not begin with semiconductors. It began with trade, escalated through intellectual property disputes, and crystallised around the question that now defines global tech: who controls the infrastructure of the digital economy?
The turning point was April 2018, when the US Commerce Department sanctioned ZTE — China’s second-largest telecoms company for violating Iran sanctions, cutting off its access to American components and nearly destroying the company. For China’s leadership, ZTE was a wake-up call. A single US government decision had brought a $17 billion company to the edge of collapse. The vulnerability was existential: China’s most important technology companies were built on American chips, American software, and American cloud infrastructure. If the US could turn that off, it could turn off China’s digital economy.
From that moment, semiconductor self-sufficiency became a Chinese national security priority, not just an industrial policy aspiration. The Made in China 2025 strategy, which had targeted 70 percent semiconductor self-sufficiency by 2025, became supercharged with government funding, talent incentives, and a whole-of-nation mobilisation that dwarfed anything the private sector could have achieved alone.
The US responded by escalating. The October 2022 export controls which restricted China’s access to advanced chips and the equipment used to make them were the most sweeping technology export restrictions in US history. They were tightened in October 2023 and again in December 2024. By March 2025, the Trump administration had imposed additional restrictions, blacklisting dozens more Chinese entities. The January 2026 rules approved limited Nvidia H200 chip exports to China under strict conditions including a 50 percent volume cap and third-party security testing while keeping the most advanced Blackwell-generation chips off limits entirely.
Where the War Stands in 2026
The technology cold war in 2026 is not a clean American victory or a Chinese breakthrough. It is a complicated stalemate with important wins and losses on both sides.
The US wins: China cannot produce extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, which are essential for the most advanced chip manufacturing. ASML, the Dutch company that makes EUV machines, has been prevented from selling to China under US pressure. Without EUV, China cannot manufacture chips below 5 nanometres at high volume. The most powerful AI training chips — Nvidia’s H100 and H200, and the newer Blackwell architecture remain largely out of China’s reach, giving the US and its partners a significant advantage in frontier AI development.
China wins: Huawei’s Ascend 910C AI chip is commercially viable for most enterprise AI applications in China. SMIC is producing 7nm-class chips using deep ultraviolet multi-patterning techniques, slower and more expensive than EUV, but functional. China’s semiconductor equipment companies — NAURA, AMEC, Piotech are growing rapidly and now serve in the global top tier. China has implemented a ’50 percent mandate’ requiring new domestic fabs to source at least half their equipment locally, accelerating the development of a fully domestic supply chain. And critically, Chinese AI companies — Alibaba, ByteDance, Baidu have optimised their workloads to run on Huawei’s Ascend architecture, reducing their Nvidia dependency by design.
The result is not one global semiconductor industry with one set of rules. It is two parallel industries, increasingly incompatible, each building its own supply chain, its own standards, and its own ecosystem of dependent companies and countries.
The African Dimension: Caught Between Two Tech Superpowers
Africa has been the arena for US-China competition in physical infrastructure for more than a decade. China’s Belt and Road Initiative has funded roads, railways, ports, and power plants across the continent $30.5 billion in construction contracts in the first half of 2025 alone, nearly five times the amount from the same period in 2024. The US has responded with the Lobito Corridor, a $4 billion railway project connecting the DRC’s copper belt to the Angolan coast and the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, a G7 initiative aimed at providing an alternative to Chinese infrastructure financing.
But the digital infrastructure battle is newer, less visible, and arguably more consequential. The decisions African governments and businesses make about which technology stack to build on Chinese or American will shape their digital economies for decades.
The Huawei 5G Question
The most visible front in Africa’s tech cold war is 5G. Huawei built a significant portion of Africa’s existing 4G mobile network infrastructure, it is estimated to supply equipment to telecoms operators in over 40 African countries. Its 5G equipment is cheaper than equivalent offerings from Nokia or Ericsson, sometimes by 30 to 50 percent and comes with financing that Western competitors cannot match.
The US has pressured African governments to exclude Huawei from 5G networks, citing national security concerns about data access by the Chinese state. Some countries including Kenya and South Africa have faced direct pressure from Washington. Others have quietly continued to deploy Huawei equipment regardless. The economic logic is powerful: for a country trying to build 5G coverage on a constrained government budget, paying 40 percent less for equivalent functionality is not a geopolitical statement. It is a financial necessity.
The risk is real but diffuse. A 5G network built on Huawei infrastructure creates potential vulnerabilities, backdoors, data access points, dependencies on Chinese-controlled software updates that are difficult to assess and expensive to mitigate after the fact. The US argument is that the upfront savings are not worth the long-term strategic risk. The African counterargument is that the US has not provided a comparably priced alternative, and that sovereignty means the right to make your own risk calculations.
The TikTok and Digital Platform Problem
TikTok is the most prominent example of a broader pattern: Chinese digital platforms have achieved enormous reach in Africa and the US government has defined them as national security risks. TikTok has over 40 million active users in Nigeria alone. It is the primary content discovery and creator monetisation platform for a generation of young Africans. Banning or restricting it as the US has done domestically would directly harm the creators and businesses that depend on it.
But TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is subject to Chinese law, including the National Intelligence Law, which requires Chinese companies to cooperate with state intelligence activities on request. Whether ByteDance has shared African user data with Chinese authorities is not publicly known. Whether it could be compelled to do so is not in doubt. African governments and regulators are only beginning to grapple with what this means for data sovereignty, the principle that a country’s data should be subject to its own laws, not those of a foreign government.
The AI Stack Decision
The most consequential and least discussed dimension of the tech cold war for Africa is AI infrastructure. As African startups, universities, and governments begin building AI-powered services in healthcare, agriculture, education, financial services, they are making foundational choices about which AI infrastructure to build on.
American cloud providers — AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure offer the most advanced AI capabilities and the most comprehensive toolsets. They are also priced in dollars, subject to US export controls, and increasingly subject to data residency requirements that may conflict with African data sovereignty goals. Chinese alternatives — Huawei Cloud, Alibaba Cloud are cheaper, more willing to localise, and increasingly capable. But they come with their own data sovereignty implications, and African AI companies that build on Chinese infrastructure may find themselves cut off if the tech cold war escalates further.
The emergence of African AI infrastructure companies like Nigeria’s Yamify is a direct response to this dilemma. But they are early, underfunded, and competing against hyperscalers with hundred-billion-dollar infrastructure budgets. The window to build genuinely African AI infrastructure, before the two superpowers’ ecosystems fully consolidate, is open but it will not stay open indefinitely.
The Strategic Options for African Countries
African countries broadly have three strategic options in the tech cold war, and most are pursuing an implicit version of all three simultaneously.
The first is non-alignment, refusing to formally ally with either side, maintaining relationships with both, and extracting maximum benefit from the competition. This is the approach that has historically worked best in infrastructure: use Chinese financing to build the road, use American software to run the traffic management system. The risk is being caught in the crossfire if the cold war heats up having critical infrastructure that either superpower could pressure you to abandon.
The second is strategic differentiation, deciding that certain categories of infrastructure are too sensitive to source from China (security systems, communications backbone, government data) while others are acceptable (consumer devices, logistics platforms, renewable energy hardware). This requires more sophisticated regulatory capacity than most African governments currently have, but it is the approach that South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria are implicitly moving toward.
The third, the most ambitious and least resourced is building African alternatives. Local cloud infrastructure. African AI models trained on African data. Pan-African digital payment systems that depend on neither the dollar nor the renminbi. This is the vision behind projects like the African Continental Free Trade Area’s digital trade protocol, the African Union’s data governance framework, and startups like Yamify. It is a long-term bet. But it is the only option that does not leave African digital sovereignty permanently contingent on choices made in Washington or Beijing.
The Bottom Line
The US-China tech cold war is not Africa’s war. Africa did not start it, cannot stop it, and has little influence over how it ends. But Africa will live with its consequences in the infrastructure it builds, the platforms it depends on, the data it surrenders, and the AI it trains its next generation of workers on.
The countries that navigate this most carefully will be the ones that extract maximum benefit from both superpowers’ competition while building enough domestic capability to preserve genuine strategic choice. That requires policy sophistication, institutional capacity, and a long-term orientation that is rare in any government, anywhere in the world.
The tech cold war is reshaping the global order. For Africa, the question is not which side to join. It is how to turn the rivalry between the two sides into leverage for the continent’s own development and how to build enough of its own digital infrastructure to have a real choice when the moment of decision arrives.
