Nigeria, Feb. 22 -- The recently concluded 2026 Global AI Summit in India has confirmed what many policymakers and experts have already sensed but few have fully internalised: that artificial intelligence has entered its industrial phase. The conversation has shifted as AI is no longer primarily about model releases, chat interfaces, or startup valuations. It is now about compute capacity, energy infrastructure, mineral supply chains, governance architecture, and national competitiveness. And in that equation, Africa is not peripheral but foundational.

It is no longer news that artificial intelligence runs on chips, chips run on critical minerals, data centres run on energy, and hardware depends on complex global supply chains. At the he...