Leverage Without Sovereignty: African Bargaining Strategies in the US–China Critical Minerals and AI Rivalry

Africa occupies a strategically distinct and almost contradictory position in technology rivalry between the United States and China. The continent holds nearly 30 percent of the world’s critical mineral reserves and the world’s largest reserves of mined cobalt, making it a chokepoint of power over the hardware layer of the artificial intelligence (AI) economy. However, African states remain almost entirely dependent on foreign-owned computing infrastructure, designed chips and cloud platforms, leaving them as rule takers within export-control regimes managed extraterritorially by Washington and Beijing. This paper contests that African states are not pursuing “non-alignment” in its traditional sense but a combination of transactional hedging strategies like beneficiation mandates, supply management, contract-terms bargaining and continental rule-making, whose objective is ‘leverage’ rather than ‘autonomy’. By analysing the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) cobalt quota regime, and Zimbabwe’s lithium export ban, along with the contested build-out of African AI data centres, the paper assesses where this approach has been able to give favourable gains, and where it has produced new dependencies. It concludes that the binding constraint is not African bargaining skill but the absence of collective action: leverage exercised nationally is often priced by markets as risk, while leverage exercised continentally could be pitched as power.

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