Sam George outlines $270m Ghana AI investment, cites risks of feeding government data into foreign models

The Minister for Communication, Digital Technology and Innovations, Samuel Nartey George, has announced a $270 million investment to develop artificial intelligence (AI) in Ghana. Of this amount, $250 million will go towards infrastructure and computing power, while the remaining $20 million will provide seed funding for an AI fund.

He said the investment would help Ghana build its AI infrastructure, including a national language-processing model. This comes amid concerns that sensitive government information is being entered into AI platforms from other countries.

Speaking at JoyNews' Digital Economy Forum on AI and the Ghana Economy on Wednesday, October 21, Mr George said he had seen cases where analysts working in ministers' offices entered classified government information into platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude.

“For me, that creates a serious risk for the country because analysts in ministers' offices are putting memos, government documents and other sensitive government data into these systems to process the information,” he said.

He questioned whether Ghana's data residency law could work as intended if government institutions continued to use foreign AI models to process sensitive information.

“We have now passed a data residency law, but it is useless if the government's own systems use a foreign AI model to process information,” he said.

Mr George said the government was working to develop what he called “Ghana Chat”. This national language-processing model would allow government institutions to use AI while also building Ghana's own skills and technical capacity.

He said the project was also meant to help the public sector benefit from AI's speed and computing power without putting sensitive government data at risk.

The Minister accepted that the proposed model would not be as capable as established platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude when it first launched. However, he said it would improve as people used it and trained it.

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

He added that existing AI systems had been built, tested and trained using billions, if not trillions, of data points. He suggested that Ghana's model would also need time and training to improve.

Mr George recognised the questions and concerns people had raised about the project but said he was confident the proposed plan would help solve the problems.

“I see all the questions being raised. They are very reasonable questions and concerns, but I believe we are on the right path to solving all these problems,” he said.