arXiv subjects

Sumaya Nur Adan

Publications and source records attributed to Sumaya Nur Adan.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Financing Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure: Mapping AI Infrastructure Investment and Compute Governance Across Africa

Artificial intelligence depends on large-scale compute resources and their supporting infrastructure. However, AI governance debates treat compute primarily as a technical input rather than as an outcome of investment, ownership, and financial control. This paper examines AI infrastructure investment flows across Africa through a systematic analysis of 46 publicly announced projects totalling USD $12.7 billion between 2019 and 2025. Using a value chain framework, we analyze who invests in AI-relevant infrastructure and where investments concentrate. Our findings reveal a highly concentrated landscape dominated by global data center operators, hyperscale technology firms, and development finance institutions, clustering in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Egypt. We introduce asymmetrical interdependence to describe a structural condition in which capital and physical infrastructure account for 73% of total funding while control remains concentrated in the compute layer among a small number of global technology firms. We argue that compute governance must account for capital flows, ownership, and control, not only geographic access, because these dynamics shape AI compute equity. Infrastructure presence is necessary but insufficient for meaningful governance capacity.

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arXiv2025

The Future of the AI Summit Series

This policy memo examines the evolution of the international AI Summit series, initiated at Bletchley Park in 2023 and continued through Seoul in 2024 and Paris in 2025, as a forum for cooperation on the governance of advanced artificial intelligence. It analyzes the factors underpinning the series' early successes and assesses challenges related to scope, participation, continuity, and institutional design. Drawing on comparisons with existing international governance models, the memo evaluates options for hosting arrangements, secretariat formats, participant selection, agenda setting, and meeting frequency. It proposes a set of design recommendations aimed at preserving the series' focus on advanced AI governance while balancing inclusivity, effectiveness, and long-term sustainability.

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arXiv2025

Toward an African Agenda for AI Safety

This paper maps Africa's distinctive AI risk profile, from deepfake fuelled electoral interference and data colonial dependency to compute scarcity, labour disruption and disproportionate exposure to climate driven environmental costs. While major benefits are promised to accrue, the availability, development and adoption of AI also mean that African people and countries face particular AI safety risks, from large scale labour market disruptions to the nefarious use of AI to manipulate public opinion. To date, African perspectives have not been meaningfully integrated into global debates and processes regarding AI safety, leaving African stakeholders with limited influence over the emerging global AI safety governance agenda. While there are Computer Incident Response Teams on the continent, none hosts a dedicated AI Safety Institute or office. We propose a five-point action plan centred on (i) a policy approach that foregrounds the protection of the human rights of those most vulnerable to experiencing the harmful socio-economic effects of AI; (ii) the establishment of an African AI Safety Institute; (iii) promote public AI literacy and awareness; (iv) development of early warning system with inclusive benchmark suites for 25+ African languages; and (v) an annual AU-level AI Safety & Security Forum.

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arXiv2023

Can apparent bystanders distinctively shape an outcome? Global south countries and global catastrophic risk-focused governance of artificial intelligence

Increasingly, there is well-grounded concern that through perpetual scaling-up of computation power and data, current deep learning techniques will create highly capable artificial intelligence that could pursue goals in a manner that is not aligned with human values. In turn, such AI could have the potential of leading to a scenario in which there is serious global-scale damage to human wellbeing. Against this backdrop, a number of researchers and public policy professionals have been developing ideas about how to govern AI in a manner that reduces the chances that it could lead to a global catastrophe. The jurisdictional focus of a vast majority of their assessments so far has been the United States, China, and Europe. That preference seems to reveal an assumption underlying most of the work in this field: That global south countries can only have a marginal role in attempts to govern AI development from a global catastrophic risk -focused perspective. Our paper sets out to undermine this assumption. We argue that global south countries like India and Singapore (and specific coalitions) could in fact be fairly consequential in the global catastrophic risk-focused governance of AI. We support our position using 4 key claims. 3 are constructed out of the current ways in which advanced foundational AI models are built and used while one is constructed on the strategic roles that global south countries and coalitions have historically played in the design and use of multilateral rules and institutions. As each claim is elaborated, we also suggest some ways through which global south countries can play a positive role in designing, strengthening and operationalizing global catastrophic risk-focused AI governance.

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