--- description: Amini founder Kate Kallot wants to ensure the Global South can reap the benefits of the artificial intelligence boom. title: Kate Kallot Is Building AI for the Global South image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte65c298f373f8b1e/6998cc0e07a30d544177d922/KKallot.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Dec 02, 2025 # Why Kate Kallot Is Building AI for the Global South by [Harry Booth](/author/harry-booth/) ## Harry Booth Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Booth is a reporter at TIME.  AFP or licensors In the Central African Republic, people say that treasure lies beneath every step. “Diamond, gold, coltan, cobalt, uranium, lithium. It’s abundant,” says technologist and entrepreneur Kate Kallot. Yet decades of political instability and the long shadow of colonial rule, which prized extraction over infrastructure, have left her family’s homeland among the world’s poorest, despite its natural wealth. Kallot is working to keep the artificial intelligence boom from reimposing the old extractive model. While artificial intelligence could ease developing countries’ challenges in sectors from health care to agriculture, it could also deepen global economic divides and leave some locales behind. A number of countries in the region are starting on the back foot, with 62% of the continent's population offline. In 2022, Kallot founded Amini, a Nairobi-based AI firm that aggregates data and trains localized models to predict agricultural yields, identify climate risk and build resilience in places that had been invisible to the global data ecosystem. In the case of multinational insurance firm Aon, that meant having the confidence to reduce farmers’ premiums across East Africa by 30%. Kallot’s ambition is to help those across the Global South participate in the digital economy, not as [data workers](https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ "undefined") or call center operators, but as builders. “We won't be billionaires by the amount of money we make, but by the amount of lives we're impacting," she says. Her bet is that AI built in and for the Global South can scale, and so far, Amini’s revenue rose 300% in 2024 and 500% in 2025. Kallot was born in France to parents exiled from the Central African Republic. They fled the dictatorship after her grandfather, a French-educated INTERPOL agent who returned to steer the newly independent nation towards prosperity, was assassinated. “This has always been at the back of my mind with everything that I do,” she says. She views Amini as "following the footsteps of my grandfather, but hoping for a different outcome." Kallot, who spent her early career at chip titans Arm, Intel, and Nvidia, realized she’d need to clear another major hurdle soon after founding Amini. Besides data, “the real bottleneck is infrastructure,” in the form of graphics processing units (GPUs) necessary within AI-enabled data centers. GPUs are highly concentrated in about 30 countries, with the U.S. and China out ahead. Africa houses less than 1% of the world’s data centers, making it a so-called “[compute desert](https://time.com/7015330/ai-chips-us-china-ownership-research/ "undefined").” Without computing infrastructure in the region, Kallot feared data would become another extractive industry, in which information is sent offshore to be analyzed, and the results are sold back at a premium. Her solution is to build localized computing infrastructure. In Kenya, Amini operates an AI hub which offers access to the company’s computing power. It is also the main partner for the government of Ivory Coast in building its local AI hub. In Barbados, Amini has deployed micro-data centers in shipping containers for the Caribbean nation’s government. The containers, which can be set up in six months, are designed to operate at a tiny fraction of the scale of American AI firms, starting at 0.1 megawatt. The computing infrastructure constraints have kept Amini focused. “We're building purpose-built AI for the challenges that we're facing,” Kallot says. “We are not yet in the place where we are building general purpose AI for challenges that don’t exist yet.” _This profile is published as a part of TIME’s TIME100 Impact Awards initiative, which recognizes leaders from across the world who are driving change in their communities. 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