On pipelines, readiness and annotative labour: Political geographies of AI and data infrastructures in Africa
Open accessAbstract
Data infrastructures are expanding rapidly across African societies, renewing the promise of modernisation, and providing a massive data resource to the dominant tech powers of the world. Google's private undersea cable, named Equiano, landed in west Africa with the intention of igniting data services, smart environments, investment opportunities and jobs. Non-governmental and multilateral agencies are busy supporting African governments in building regulatory frameworks that aim to ‘ready’ countries for the 4th industrial revolution. Young Africans labour in remodelled shipping containers to annotate data and train algorithms. While future promises pan out in wide-angled, utopian visions, this paper sets out an approach to understand African contexts as sites of heterogeneous experience of data infrastructures that are historically and politically contingent. The paper explores the spatial politics of extraction, surveillance, and exploitation in three examples of the Equiano pipeline, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Readiness Index, and the AI annotative labour force. We challenge the homogenising discourses of global tech companies and transnational governance institutions in accounting for the geographical histories of colonialism and its afterlives in African societies. We further call for empirical studies that examine the granular multiplicities of data, providing nuanced understandings of AI in and from Africa.
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Energy demands are often offloaded to data centers in regions with weak environmental regulations, like the Global South.
“Energy demands are often offloaded to data centers in regions with weak environmental regulations, like the Global South.”
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- Authors
- Holden, K., & Harsh, M.
- Affiliations
- Queen Mary University of London (GB)
- California Polytechnic State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Holden, Kerry
- Venue
- Political Geography
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2024-08
- Volume
- 113
- Pages
- 103150
- ISSN
- 0962-6298 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4399780815
- Cited by
- 16
- References
- 39
- Citations by year
- 2026: 9 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 1
- FWCI
- 6.66
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Political Geography (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- Queen Mary Research Online (Queen Mary University of London) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- Funders
- Library of Congress
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Social Sciences › Law › Digitalization, Law, and Regulation
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Media Technology › ICT Impact and Policies
- Keywords
- data infrastructure, artificial intelligence, AI Readiness Index, algorithm training, colonialism, surveillance, extraction, transnational governance, Africa, Fourth Industrial Revolution
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