Sam George outlines $270m AI investment in Ghana

The Minister for Communication, Digital Technology and Innovations, Samuel Nartey George, has outlined a $270 million investment in Ghana’s artificial intelligence (AI) development, with $250 million earmarked for infrastructure and computing capacity and the remaining $20 million for seed funding for an AI fund.

He said the investment would support the development of Ghana’s AI infrastructure, including a national language-processing model, amid concerns about sensitive government information being fed into foreign AI platforms.

Speaking during JoyNews’ Digital Economy Forum on AI and the Ghana Economy on Wednesday, October 21, Mr George said he had observed instances where classified government material was being entered into platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude by analysts working in ministers’ offices.

“That for me represents a critical national risk because memos, government material, critical government sensitive data is being fed into these systems by analysts sitting in ministers’ offices to process that data,” he said.

He questioned the effectiveness of the country’s data residency law if government institutions continued to rely on foreign AI models to process sensitive information.

“Now we have a residency law that we’ve passed, but it’s useless if the government system itself is using a foreign AI model to do processing,” he said.

Mr George said the government was working towards developing what he called the “Ghana Chat”, a national language-processing model that would allow government institutions to use AI while building local capacity.

He said the initiative was also intended to ensure that the public sector benefited from the speed and computing power of AI without compromising sensitive government data.

The Minister acknowledged that the proposed model would not initially match the capabilities of established platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude but said its performance would improve through continued use and training.

“At start, will it be as effective as Claude and ChatGPT? Definitely not. But then the more you use it and the more you teach it, the more the machines learn, the better the system will get,” he said.

He added that existing AI systems had been built, piloted and trained using billions, if not trillions, of data points, suggesting that Ghana’s model would similarly require time and training to improve.

Mr George acknowledged the questions and concerns raised about the initiative but expressed confidence that the proposed approach would help address the issues.

“So basically I see all the questions that are being raised, very legitimate questions, very legitimate issues, but I believe that we are on the right track to resolving all of those issues,” he said.