Competition, Market Power and Artificial Intelligence Ecosystems in Africa

Abstract

The expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) use across markets globally and in Africa poses exciting opportunities but also presents risks to economic policy making especially competition policy. Because of the integrated nature of an AI ecosystem, a simple exercise of market power, where a market player can exert power in an immediate level of the market, yields significantly different competition outcomes in an integrated ecosystem. To show the integrated nature of the AI markets, we construct a network structure of an AI ecosystem and use centrality measures based on network analysis methodology from the field of computer science to assess ecosystem power and concentration in the different AI input markets. Our findings are particularly significant because the network structure reflects the current limited participation of African firms in the design, fabrication, and assembly of AI chips or in the semiconductor manufacturing space. Coupled with backward and forward integration that can occur in this ecosystem where firms move into adjacent markets potentially enhancing their ecosystem power in African AI ecosystems. African competition authorities and policy makers should be cognisant of the future implications of consolidation in nascent AI markets in Africa and be proactive in adopting a competition lens in viewing AI ecosystems.

Received: 11 September 2025 | Revised: 19 November 2025 | Accepted: 2 December 2025

Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement
The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Data Centre Map at https://www.datacentermap.com/africa/.

Author Contribution Statement
Oluwatobi Ogundele: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration. Lozindaba Mbvundula: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft. Balisa Mhambi: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft. Olukunle Ogundele: Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Writing - review & editing, Visualization.