Key points
- Korea pitches AI at a Seoul meeting with 45 African nations
- A $170 million loan backs a Tanzania AI school
- Elice Group runs the cloud for African startups
- Elice's retail IPO orders open October 7
Korea is offering AI infrastructure and cloud services as part of its push for development projects in Africa. Elice Group (엘리스그룹), which supplies cloud services under the initiative, is also preparing a Kosdaq IPO with retail subscriptions scheduled for October 7 and 8.
The approach puts Korea in competition with China, whose African infrastructure projects have included large railway and road loans, Hankyung (한국경제) reported in a September 25 analysis. At a September 9 meeting in Seoul with ministers from 45 African countries, a reporter asked Korean and African Development Bank officials why Africa should choose Korea.
Koo Yun-cheol (구윤철) was Korea's finance minister at the time and has since left the post. He answered with Korea's own history, as Hankyung described it. Korea went from receiving aid to becoming an advanced economy, and the government says it can pass that know-how on together with AI.
Railways and debt
Some of China's Africa deals left borrowers with heavy repayments, Hankyung reported, citing Reuters. Kenya borrowed $5 billion from China in 2014 and 2015 to build a railway from the port city of Mombasa to near Naivasha. Last October, Kenya converted those dollar loans into yuan to lower its interest bill, and the government estimated it would save about $215 million a year.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chinese companies agreed to invest $3 billion in roads and hospitals in exchange for 68% of a copper and cobalt venture. A 2023 audit found only $822 million had actually been invested, and in 2024 the two sides agreed to raise the infrastructure pledge to as much as $7 billion.
What Korea is offering
The government calls its plan the K-AI package. It adds AI solutions, data centers, and power facilities to infrastructure projects that Korea's Economic Development Cooperation Fund (EDCF) supports in water, health, energy, transport, and agriculture.
The first project is an AI and digital technology school in Tanzania, with departments for AI, robotics, data analytics, and the Internet of Things. The EDCF approved a $170 million loan for it on August 23, and only Korean companies can win the contracts, Aju Business Daily (아주경제) reported.
Korea is also giving African startups vouchers to use Korean AI cloud services, paid from a trust fund it runs with the African Development Bank. Elice provides the cloud service, and HealthOnCloud (헬스온클라우드) and Baro AI (바로AI) work with the startups on products, according to Hankyung. The two sides also signed a letter of intent to set up an African Development Bank AI hub in Korea.
The cloud supplier is going public
Elice Group is offering 2,222,000 new shares at 70,400 won to 90,500 won each ($52 to $67), according to its securities filing. That would raise 156.4 billion won to 201.1 billion won ($115M to $148M). Institutional orders close on October 1, and retail investors can subscribe on October 7 and 8. Korean media expect the shares to list on October 19, though the filing says the date isn't fixed yet.
Elice started in 2015 as an AI education company, and AI cloud now brings in most of its revenue, 76% in the first half of 2026. Revenue that half was 34.4 billion won ($25M), up 202% from a year earlier, and operating profit was 10.3 billion won ($7.6M). The government is its biggest customer. One agency, the National IT Industry Promotion Agency, made up 66% of first-half revenue.
The filing doesn't mention Africa, and it says all of the company's recent revenue came from Korea. No value for the African cloud vouchers has been disclosed. Elice plans to spend most of the IPO money on a modular AI data center in the Honam region, the same part of Korea where Samsung and SK Hynix are planning a chip cluster.
What Korea still has to prove
Many African developers already build local-language AI models on Chinese open models such as DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen, because they're cheaper to train and easy to change, Hankyung reported, citing Foreign Policy. Hankyung wrote that Korea will need to show its services work in each country and that local staff and companies can keep running them after the support ends.
At the Seoul meeting, African Development Bank President Sidi Ould Tah answered the same question by saying Korea's path and technology are useful for Africa, and that Africa will work with partner countries to build its own capabilities.
Won figures are converted at 1,357.10 won to the dollar, Naver Finance's closing rate on September 23, 2026, the last trading day before the Chuseok holiday.
