Silicon Elsewhere

Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of Techno-Capital

Andrea Pollio

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520413092
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: IT Industry
• Index: Business

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Heralded as Africa's "Silicon Savannah"—a cradle of innovation—Nairobi has become a technology and innovation capital for Kenya and for the continent at large. With a national strategy that has prioritized digital technology for the last two decades, many Chinese digital champions, smaller startups, and investors have since chosen Nairobi as their African landing pad. Mapping the interface between Nairobi's innovation scene and China's digital presence there, Silicon Elsewhere tells a unique story of ingenuity and adaptation, failure and speculation, and hopefulness and pragmatism. Andrea Pollio's ethnography draws on interviews with cautious venture capitalists, renegade entrepreneurs, dedicated bureaucrats, and ambitious data scientists to explore the competing meanings of contemporary techno-capital. Moving between leafy coworking spaces and the temperature-controlled rooms of brand-new data centers, Pollio locates Nairobi among the experimental capitals, not peripheries, of technological change in the early twenty-first century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations, Chinese Pinyin Terms, and Kiswahili and Sheng Terms
• Introduction
• 1. Silicon States of Development
• 2. Machines of Data Frontiers
• 3. Platforms of Algorithmic Suturing
• 4. Microgeopolitics of Standards
• 5. Labors of Investability
• 6. Ethnographies of Techno-Optimism
• Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index