Africa’s telecom story has long been about expanding connectivity—from towers and fibre to 4G and 5G. AI is now changing what those networks are expected to do, pushing them from moving data towards processing it and acting on it in real time.
For Nokia, the Finnish technology company that once dominated Nigeria’s mobile phone market and has spent decades building Africa’s telecom infrastructure, that shift is both an opportunity and a new competitive battleground. Africa’s telecom market, estimated at $66 billion and projected to reach $90.3 billion by 2030, is attracting fresh investment from global technology companies such as Meta, Google and Microsoft.
Their investments in subsea cables, cloud infrastructure and AI are giving them greater control over the infrastructure underpinning Africa’s next phase of digital growth. For Nokia, the stakes go beyond selling network equipment: it must secure a role in that infrastructure or risk becoming a lower-value connectivity provider in the emerging AI economy. That is the market Nokia is positioning for.
The company expects AI-native networks, edge computing, automation and software to become increasingly important, even as much of Africa still struggles with reliable connectivity. “Africa remains highly unconnected right now,” Danial Mausoof, Nokia’s vice president of Mobile Infrastructure for the Middle East and Africa, said in an interview with TechCabal on August 25. “We’re invested. We’re fully committed to Africa.” Nokia still sees 4G and 5G as the foundation of its African strategy.
Mausoof said it works with major operator groups, including Airtel, Orange, Vodacom, Safaricom, and Maroc Telecom, and has 5G deployments in markets such as Angola, South Africa, and Ethiopia. But Nokia wants to extract more value from those networks than connectivity alone can provide. Its Artificial Intelligence Radio Access Network (AI-RAN) platform combines existing telecom infrastructure with GPU-based computing to bring AI workloads