SA needs sovereign tech infrastructure, not just foreign server farms on its soil

South Africa finds itself sandwiched between Silicon Valley and Shenzhen, compelled to transcend the passive hosting of foreign data centres. Embracing a strategy akin to the European Union, with cues from France's approach at the Africa Forward summit, presents a pragmatic route towards genuine structural autonomy. Makibinyane Mohapeloa, chief operating officer of MzansiSat and founder of Tshokoma Training and Consulting, champions the establishment of a Pan-African GovSatCom partnership aimed at sovereign satellite infrastructure for the continent.

President Cyril Ramaphosa recently applauded substantial investments from tech giants Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Mastercard, highlighting Google's African Cloud Summit in Johannesburg on July 1st as a significant achievement. However, the presence of foreign cloud infrastructure does not guarantee local ownership or control, as Research ICT Africa's research on data sovereignty illustrates.

These substantial foreign investments highlight a profound geopolitical dependence, rather than technological prowess. Ramaphosa's recent trip to Paris, where French firms pledged €1.11-billion to bolster South Africa's economy with focus on industrial manufacturing and energy transition, gains substantial strategic significance.

This momentum aligns with the structural shift underscored at the France-hosted Africa Forward summit in Nairobi, which emphasized diminishing Euro-African technological reliance on leading global powers. By shifting towards mutual co-investment, this revamped economic diplomacy tackles South Africa's primary digital vulnerabilities.

The tech economy is establishing a lopsided hierarchy, with Latin America and Africa controlling less than 3% of global computational capacity, paralleling colonial trade patterns where raw peripheral data is extracted, processed in northern centers, and sold back as proprietary software. To dismantle this dependency cycle, Pretoria should prioritize specific applications in agriculture, water management, and public health, while enforcing that essential data circuits are stored domestically.

Hence, sovereign infrastructure, including national satellite capacity to maintain connectivity and data circuits under domestic jurisdiction, deserves equal strategic emphasis as terrestrial data localisation. Crucially, this expansion must be tied to resource limitations; as leaders warned at Africa Forward, AI computing capacity is entirely contingent on energy.

Advanced models demand substantial power and water, exacerbating our vulnerable electricity grid. Subsidizing foreign hyper-scalers without ensuring local ownership entails enduring environmental repercussions without reaping the high-value technical capabilities generated. Local industrial power must expand alongside computing capacity through genuine technology co-ownership.

This predicament is unfolding on the regulatory front through the adoption of the AfCFTA Protocol on Digital Trade. While aiming to unify rules, the continent may continue to act as a passive rule-taker in an area frequently exploited by corporate lobbying. Here, South Africa's G20 history and our role as the EU's initial partner under the Clean Trade and Investment Partnership (CTIP) are vital diplomatic tools.

In this scenario, Europe functions as a fellow traveler in the geopolitical wilderness. Between US Big Tech and Shenzhen, Brussels shares SA's concern of becoming a digital colony. This symmetric vulnerability transforms the co-investment approach discussed at Africa Forward into a highly practical template. By focusing on shared risk-taking and local value enhancement, this model provides a realistic framework for future EU-Africa interactions.

For South Africa, which directs 45% of its processed goods to the AfCFTA, this justifies urging the EU to broaden local content requirements to encompass midstream processing within partner nations. The multiplex path to autonomy ultimately, our digital destiny requires moving beyond merely acting as a host to foreign server farms.

As the tech economy threatens to lock us into a fresh era of digital extractivism, South Africa's Institute of International Affairs' plea to assert structural agency through science diplomacy serves as our operational directive. By leveraging our shared vulnerabilities with a cornered Europe, Pretoria can maintain a demanding, multifaceted dialogue that keeps all global screens operational.

True technological sovereignty necessitates active control of the infrastructure, energy systems, and data circuits that shape the contemporary order. This is the same rationale behind constructing sovereign African satellite capacity: infrastructure that a nation owns and operates, rather than infrastructure merely hosted on its soil.

South Africa's future hinges on co-engineering the rules of this new digital age instead of being quietly governed by them.