Google will open an AI center in Ghana later this year, its first in Africa

Tech giants are pouring money into artificial intelligence. Baidu and Google spent between $20 and $30 billion on AI in 2016 alone, according to research from McKinsey. In Google's case, a portion of that investment went to AI centers in China and France, and the Mountain View company shows no signs of slowing down. Today, Google announced its next AI research center will be in Accra, Ghana. "In recent years, we've … witnessed an increasing interest in machine learning research across the continent," senior Google AI fellow Jeff Dean and staff research scientist Moustapha Cisse wrote in a blog post.