As it opened its doors on April 7, 2026, at the very moment the Strait of Hormuz was wavering and oil prices were shattering the assumptions underpinning Morocco’s Finance Law, GITEX Africa Morocco 2026 was not merely another technology exhibition.
The paradox must be fully understood. Since February 28, 2026, the Strait of Hormuz — through which 20% of the world’s oil supply transits — has been operating under near paralysis. Oil prices surged to a record $110 per barrel, while Morocco’s national budget had been built on the assumption of a maximum of $65. The government of Aziz Akhannouch established an emergency ministerial commission. And in this same Morocco, under energy pressure and inflationary strain, Marrakech welcomed 1,450 technology companies from 130 countries to debate Africa’s digital future.
This is not an inconsistency; it is a structural response to the vulnerability that the war in Iran has suddenly made impossible to ignore. A country that imports its energy, its equipment, and its technologies is a country that does not fully determine its own destiny. Digital sovereignty is not an abstract public policy concept. In the world now being reshaped before our eyes, it is the very condition of strategic autonomy.
Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni understands this clearly when she warns that “the world’s cards are being reshuffled.” Artificial intelligence, she argues, has become “a lever of competitiveness, an issue of sovereignty, an object of regulation, and a new way of governing.” The statement deserves to be weighed word by word. Because behind the event-driven gloss of GITEX — the booths, startup pitches, and plenary conferences — something much deeper is at stake. Who will write the rules of African AI? Washington? Beijing? Brussels? Or Marrakech?
The competition is well documented. The United States has invested more than $300 billion in AI in recent years. China is pursuing its industrial strategy with more than $100 billion in combined public and private investment. The European Union is preparing a €200 billion plan of its own. Three blocs, three visions, three models of technological governance. And where does Africa stand in all this? A continent of 1.4 billion people, where AI could generate $1.2 trillion in value by 2030, yet one that risks becoming nothing more than a consumer market if it fails to secure a seat at the table where standards are defined. Chakib Alj summarized it bluntly at the opening of the exhibition: “If Africa does not participate in shaping the rules of AI, others will define them in its place.”
This is where Morocco is playing a unique — and perilous — role. The Kingdom is navigating a world in which every technological choice has now become a geopolitical choice. The simultaneous presence at GITEX of global actors openly promoting their ambitions for “digital sovereignty in Africa” says everything about the complexity of the great game now unfolding.
In this context, GITEX Africa Morocco 2026 matters less for what it displays than for what it symbolizes. It symbolizes Morocco’s decision to become a platform rather than a spectator. It signals that digital sovereignty is not the luxury of post-crisis prosperity, but rather the investment that makes crises bearable in the first place.
The data centers emerging in Casablanca, Dakhla, and Settat, the RamadanIA hackathon that mobilized 4,000 young people across all regions of the Kingdom, and the Morocco 300 program aimed at internationalizing national startups are all bricks in a larger structure whose essential utility has just been reinforced by global tensions.
The world emerging from this sequence will be one in which nations are either sovereign or dependent. Morocco has chosen its side. It now falls upon the country to fulfill the promise embodied by this exhibition.
Zouhair Yata
