Why M-Pesa Does Not Scale to AI Infrastructure

The M-Pesa Kenya case is the strongest counterargument to this essay's pessimism it shows infrastructure access is achievable when conditions are right. The conditions were: low capital requirements, regulatory flexibility, and a single enabling private actor. None of these apply to frontier AI compute. The capital requirements are orders of magnitude higher, the technology cannot be disaggregated into affordable local units, and no private actor has commercial incentive to build at scale in low-purchasing-power markets.