Africa, Middle East emerging as battleground for US-China ‘enterprise tech trade war’ — experts

Africa and Middle East are “emerging as a battleground for international tech supremacy in all areas related to enterprise technology” between the United States and China, which includes cloud, radio access networks for enterprise 5G, and artificial intelligence (AI), according to the London-based data and analytics firm GlobalData.
While the growing geopolitical tensions between the US and China have not yet erupted into an actual physical conflict, analysts have warned that there are “signposts of a struggle” in the region as the two superpowers fight for dominance of the enterprise tech market. The conflict in the enterprise first emerged when Chinese tech giant Huawei became the first cloud vendor to create a regional public cloud in Africa, starting with Johannesburg in 2018. “Chinese vendors, principally Huawei, are moving in to woo telcos and governments with the promise of improved infrastructure and an immediate boost to national economies, all of which dovetails with the digitalization of economies and the fulfillment of national visions,” Ismail Patel, Enterprise Technology Analyst at GlobalData, said. “Offsetting this, the threat of US sanctions is delaying many countries from putting all their eggs in the Chinese basket,” Patel added.
The UAE-based AI group G42, which had been working very closely with Huawei, then struck a $1.5 billion deal with Microsoft in April. “The effort to work with Microsoft as an alternative to Huawei is generally a positive development and one that we want to encourage,” White House technology advisor Tarun Chhabra said at a Washington, D.C. event held by the Council on Foreign Relations think tank. “Many operators and governments in (Africa and the Middle East) will continue to straddle the fine line between embracing capital-efficient Chinese technologies and locking themselves to them,” says Patel. As the rivalry between Washington and Beijing has put countries in the region in a challenging position, experts say that the latter will make their policy choices against the geopolitical backdrop, notably based on which of the two trade superpowers they want to align with.