The Speaker of the ECOWAS Parliament, Hajia Memounatou Ibrahima, has urged lawmakers to embrace AI to strengthen legislative work and democratic governance across West Africa.
Speaking at the Parliament’s 2025 Second Extraordinary Session in Port Harcourt, she said AI could improve communication with citizens, support regulatory frameworks, and drive inclusive growth.
Nigeria’s Deputy Senate President, Sen. Jibrin Barau, highlighted AI’s potential to enhance efficiency, accountability and oversight while cautioning lawmakers to examine associated risks.
Nigerian ambassador Ahmed Dunoma, Permanent Secretary of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, stressed that AI is already shaping education and security sectors. He called for proactive guidance to ensure its deployment deepens integration and safeguards democracy.
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South Korea has secured a significant partnership with BlackRock to accelerate its ambition of becoming Asia’s leading AI hub. The agreement will see the global asset manager join the Ministry of Science and ICT in developing hyperscale AI data centres.
A deal that followed a meeting between President Lee Jae Myung and BlackRock chair Larry Fink, who pledged to attract large-scale international investment into the country’s AI infrastructure.
Although no figures were disclosed, the partnership is expected to focus on meeting rising demand from domestic users and the wider Asia-Pacific region, with renewable energy powering the facilities.
The move comes as Seoul increases national funding for AI, semiconductors and other strategic technologies to KRW150 trillion ($107.7 billion). South Korean companies are also stepping up efforts, with SK Telecom announcing plans to raise AI investment to a third of its revenue over five years.
BlackRock’s involvement signals international confidence in South Korea’s long-term vision to position itself as a regional AI powerhouse and secure a leadership role in next-generation digital infrastructure.
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OpenAI and NVIDIA have unveiled plans for a major partnership to build next-generation AI infrastructure, with NVIDIA committing up to $100 billion to support OpenAI’s push toward superintelligence. The deal, outlined in a letter of intent, will see NVIDIA provide at least 10 gigawatts of computing power, with the first systems expected to be online in late 2026 through its new Vera Rubin platform.
NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang called the agreement the next leap forward in AI, noting the companies’ decade-long collaboration from the early DGX supercomputers to the rise of ChatGPT. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman stressed that computing power is now the backbone of the future economy, framing the new investment as vital for both breakthroughs and large-scale access to AI.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman emphasised the scale of the move, saying 10 gigawatts of computing will allow the organisation to expand the frontier of intelligence and make the benefits of AI more widely available. NVIDIA will serve as OpenAI’s preferred partner for compute and networking, with both companies coordinating their hardware and software roadmaps.
The alliance builds on OpenAI’s existing collaborations with companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and SoftBank, which are working with the group to develop advanced AI infrastructure. Together, they are targeting global enterprise adoption while ensuring systems can grow at a pace that matches AI’s rapid evolution.
With over 700 million weekly active users and strong uptake across businesses and developers, OpenAI sees the partnership as central to its mission of creating artificial general intelligence that benefits humanity. Details of the deal are expected to be finalised in the coming weeks.
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Albania has made history by introducing the world’s first AI government minister, named Diella, who gave her inaugural address to parliament this week. Appearing in a video as a woman in traditional Albanian dress, Diella defended her appointment by stressing she was ‘not here to replace people, but to help them.’
She also dismissed accusations of being ‘unconstitutional,’ saying the real threat to the constitution comes from ‘inhumane decisions of those in power.’ Prime Minister Edi Rama announced that the AI minister will oversee all public tenders, promising full transparency and a corruption-free process.
The move comes as Albania struggles with corruption scandals, including the detention of Tirana’s mayor on charges of money laundering and abuse of contracts. Albania currently ranks 80th out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s corruption index.
VIDEO: 🇦🇱 Albania's new AI-generated minister makes first address to parliament
The world's first AI government minister defended her role as "not here to replace people, but to help them". 'Diella' was appointed by Prime Minister Edi Rama last week pic.twitter.com/2dFh082DLz
The opposition, however, fiercely rejected the initiative. Former prime minister and Democratic Party leader Sali Berisha called the project a publicity stunt, warning that Diella cannot curb corruption and that it is unconstitutional. The opposition has vowed to challenge the appointment in the Constitutional Court after boycotting the parliamentary vote.
Despite the controversy, the government insists the AI minister reflects its commitment to reform and the EU integration. Rama has set an ambitious goal of leading Albania, a nation of 2.8 million, into the European Union by 2030, with the fight against corruption at the heart of that mission.
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AI is set to reshape daily life in 2026, with innovations moving beyond software to influence the physical world, work environments, and international relations.
Autonomous agents will increasingly manage household and workplace tasks, coordinating projects, handling logistics, and interacting with smart devices instead of relying solely on humans.
Synthetic content will become ubiquitous, potentially comprising up to 90 percent of online material. While it can accelerate data analysis and insight generation, the challenge will be to ensure genuine human creativity and experience remain visible instead of being drowned out by generic AI outputs.
The workplace will see both opportunity and disruption. Routine and administrative work will increasingly be offloaded to AI, creating roles such as prompt engineers and AI ethics specialists, while some traditional positions face redundancy.
Similarly, AI will expand into healthcare, autonomous transport, and industrial automation, becoming a tangible presence in everyday life instead of remaining a background technology.
Governments and global institutions will grapple with AI’s geopolitical and economic impact. From trade restrictions to synthetic propaganda, world leaders will attempt to control AI’s spread and underlying data instead of allowing a single country or corporation to have unchecked dominance.
Energy efficiency and sustainability will also rise to the fore, as AI’s growing power demands require innovative solutions to reduce environmental impact.
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Te Whatu Ora (the healthcare system of New Zealand) has appointed Sonny Taite as acting director of innovation and AI and launched a new programme called HealthX.
An initiative that aims to deliver one AI-driven healthcare project each month from September 2025 until February 2026, based on ideas from frontline staff instead of new concepts.
Speaking at the TUANZ and DHA Tech Users Summit in Auckland, New Zealand, Taite explained that HealthX will focus on three pressing challenges: workforce shortages, inequitable access to care, and clinical inefficiencies.
He emphasised the importance of validating ideas, securing funding, and ensuring successful pilots scale nationally.
The programme has already tested an AI-powered medical scribe in the Hawke’s Bay emergency department, with early results showing a significant reduction in administrative workload.
Taite is also exploring solutions for specialist shortages, particularly in dermatology, where some regions lack public services, forcing patients to travel or seek private care.
A core cross-functional team, a clinical expert group, and frontline champions such as chief medical officers will drive HealthX.
Taite underlined that building on existing cybersecurity and AI infrastructure at Te Whatu Ora, which already processes billions of security signals monthly, provides a strong foundation for scaling innovation across the health system.
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The Chinese tech company, Huawei, has introduced over 30 global benchmark showcases at HUAWEI CONNECT 2025, highlighting how AI is reshaping digital transformation across education, healthcare, finance, government, and energy.
The company emphasised that networks have become the backbone of intelligent upgrades instead of serving only as information channels.
Among the examples, Shenzhen Welkin School presented an innovative education model to expand equitable learning opportunities. In finance, China Pacific Insurance demonstrated how its intelligent computing centre uses large-model training and inference to accelerate digital services.
Resorts World Sentosa in Singapore showcased an innovative campus network that improves the visitor experience and sets a new standard for digital innovation.
These initiatives were developed jointly by Huawei and its partners, creating replicable practices that can be applied worldwide. Leaders from Huawei and industry organisations attended the launch, underlining the collaborative nature of these projects.
The showcases will be open for on-site visits, offering customers direct insight into how AI can be integrated into networks to boost efficiency and enhance user experience.
Huawei noted that the insights gained from these projects will guide future innovations. The company and its partners aim to refine solutions and extend their applicability across various sectors by drawing on proven industry applications.
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The company has already invested over $1 billion in digital infrastructure, including subsea cable projects such as Equiano and Umoja, enabling 100 million people to come online for the first time. Four new regional cable hubs are being established to boost connectivity and resilience further.
Alongside infrastructure, Google will provide college students in eight African countries with a free one-year subscription to Google AI Pro. The tools, including Gemini 2.5 Pro and Guided Learning, are designed to support research, coding, and problem-solving.
By 2030, Google says it intends to reach 500 million Africans with AI-powered innovations tackling issues such as crop resilience, flood forecasting and access to education.
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More than 38 million farmers in India have received AI-powered forecasts predicting the start of the monsoon season, helping them plan when to sow crops.
The forecasts, powered by NeuralGCM, a Google Research model, blend physics-based simulations with machine learning trained on decades of climate data.
Unlike traditional models requiring supercomputers, NeuralGCM can run on a laptop, making advanced AI weather predictions more accessible.
Research shows that accurate early forecasts can nearly double Indian farmers’ annual income by helping them decide when to plant, switch crops or hold back.
The initiative demonstrates how AI research can directly support communities vulnerable to climate shifts and improve resilience in agriculture.
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To support this momentum, Google Cloud hosted its first AI Builders Forum in Silicon Valley, where hundreds of founders gathered to hear about new tools, infrastructure and programmes designed to accelerate innovation.
Google Cloud has also released a technical guide to help startups build and scale AI agents, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and multimodal approaches. The guide highlights leveraging Google’s agentic development kit and agent-to-agent tools.
The support is bolstered by the Google for Startups Cloud Program, which offers credits worth up to $350,000, mentorship and access to partner AI models from Anthropic and Meta. Google says its goal is to give startups the technology and resources to launch, scale and compete globally.
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