Bunmi Akinremi
Speaker at AMLD Africa 2026
Bunmi Akinremi is a machine learning engineer and researcher with a background in computer science and mathematics, working at the intersection of AI systems and real-world impact. Her work spans reinforcement learning, large-scale ML pipelines, anomaly detection, and responsible data use, with experience across industry and research. She has spoken at international conferences and leads community initiatives focused on ethical, inclusive, and practical applications of AI.
At AMLD Africa
WITS University, Johannesburg, South Africa
Sovereignty is a Pipe Dream Without Pipelines
In the halls of government, we debate Data Sovereignty. But in the server room, the reality is stark: Africa is a digital tenant. We rent our storage, our compute, and the intelligence (LLMs) that power our nascent digital economy. In this talk, I argue that without physical control over the AI supply chain, from training data to inference hardware, sovereignty is merely a pipe dream. Whether this is a conversation for Africa right now or in the future is largely up to the governments and funders. However, its immediate effects are not oblivious as talent moves across seas in search of systems that enable them, and debates around African rights to models trained on locally curated data persist.
