Shenzhen · 22.54°N 114.06°E
I take systems from problem to shipped, AI native or not, and I keep Africa connected to what gets built here.
Hard problems, working systems.
AI Software Hardware & robotics Manufacturing Automation
In one paragraph
I am Francis Okafor, AI & tech lead and engineer. Eight years inside China's tech ecosystem have carried my work from machine learning in production to enterprise software, manufacturing systems, robotics and the automation that ties them together. Beyond the systems, I build communities, I open doors between Africa and China, and I champion Black excellence in tech wherever I stand.
Knowledge hub
Three gates decide what you can call from a mainland connection: the network, the account and the payment rail. Only one is a firewall, and it is the one that matters least.
Qwen3 claims 119 languages. Open the actual list and Swahili is the only Niger-Congo entry. Yoruba appears in the technical report once, as the language they left out of the evaluation.
The model is a component you swap. The harness around it, tool schemas, validation, sandboxes, budgets, permissions and audit logs, is where nearly every production AI incident actually starts.
Hyperscaler capex reached roughly $745bn for 2026 while the two largest labs run at about $105bn combined. The bubble is real. The compute will outlive it. An engineer's read from Shenzhen.
Two randomized trials of AI-assisted developers reached opposite results. The difference was not the tool. It was how much of the task depended on context nobody had written down.
Chinese firms built much of Africa's power and telecom. Now the AI models are Chinese and free, and free is a more durable form of influence than any loan.
Building
AI, software and hardware, documented end to end. Evidence over assertion.
Read closely
AI inspection and failure analysis for electronics assembly. Cameras capture every unit at each build state, then models flag defects no golden-sample rule ever encoded.
A VS Code fork built around agentic editing, with its own Composer models, a pull request review bot and SOC 2 controls for teams that want AI in the editor.
End-to-end computer vision platform for labelling, training and deploying detection models to cloud or edge hardware like Jetson, with a visual builder for multi-step vision pipelines.
Open-source inference server for self-hosted LLMs. PagedAttention and continuous batching for high-concurrency serving across Nvidia, AMD, Intel and CPU backends.
Static analysis and AppSec platform where rules are readable code patterns, plus a plugin that scans every file an AI coding agent writes.
Managed vector database built on Milvus, the open-source engine behind most billion-scale retrieval systems, for teams who need hybrid search without running the cluster themselves.
On the ground
Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
Shenzhen, China
Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
Where conversations start
Most messages begin in one of these four places. Saying which one is the fastest route to a useful reply. I read everything personally.
A disagreement with an argument, a correction, or a request for the source behind a number.
Start here → 02Students, engineers and founders asking how the route in actually works, and what it costs.
Start here → 03The diaspora work in Shenzhen, mentoring, and technology moving between Africa and China.
Start here → 04A stage, a panel, a workshop or a story. Reference details are on the press and speaking page.
Start here →Press
The story of building between two ecosystems, told by the people who cover it.
Emma Okonji on the work of organising a professional diaspora in China’s hardware capital: community mapping, talent development and a faster route into the ecosystem for new arrivals. “Excellence that nobody can see does not compound. Excellence that is organised can.”
Read the piece ↗Rommy Imah traces the route from a 2018 Chinese Government Scholarship to leading the Nigerian community in Shenzhen, and the argument that a diaspora is distributed capacity rather than talent lost.
Read the piece ↗Francis Okafor Stuns China, Emerges Second-Place Winner @ Tencent OpenClaw Hackathon
Read the piece ↗In a striking moment of global recognition for African talent in artificial intelligence, Shenzhen-based Nigerian technologist, Francis Okafor has emerged as the second-place winner at the 2026 Tencent OpenClaw Hackathon, a fiercely contested competition hosted by Chinese tech giant Tencen
Read the piece ↗In a powerful display of global talent, Nigerian technologist Francis Okafor has secured second place at the prestigious 2026 Tencent OpenClaw Hackathon in Shenzhen. Competing in the heart of “China’s Silicon Valley,” Okafor’s victory serves as a landmark moment for African representation in the high-stakes world of artificial intelligence. Okafor, a senior tech lead and AI advocate, admits that his path to the podium began with a heavy dose of nerves. Walking into Tencent’s buzzing facility, he found himself surrounded by elite programmers already deep in their workflows.
Read the piece ↗Francis Okafor, originally from Anambra State, has spent eight years in China, establishing himself in one of the world’s most competitive innovation ecosystems.
Read the piece ↗If any of this work is close to a problem you're thinking about, I'm always open to a conversation about the subject matter.
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