Earlier this year, in a conference room at the Nairobi headquarters of a social impact startup named Qhala, a group of executives from tech firms across the continent gathered to hear a presentation about the promise of AI. The speaker was Harrison Li, chief solutions architect for Huawei Cloud in sub-Saharan Africa, and the subject was DeepSeek, a buzzy new entrant in the global artificial-intelligence race.
Huawei Technologies Co. and DeepSeek’s parent, High-Flyer, started collaborating a couple years ago, and now, Huawei is bundling access to the large language model with its own storage and cloud computing services. Li’s pitch is that China’s ...