The U.S. Says It Closed $25.67 Billion in African Deals. China Still Trades Four Times More.

Bilateral trade between the United States and Africa ran about $83.4 billion last year, per the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. China-Africa trade over the same period hit roughly $348 billion, according to Beijing's General Administration of Customs: more than four times the U.S. figure. The State Department says it has nonetheless helped American companies close 37 commercial transactions worth $25.67 billion across Africa since President Trump's second term began, headlined by a $6.2 billion data-center and hydropower project in Lesotho that officials call the largest commercial transaction in that country's history.

The Lesotho project bundles a hyperscale data center with a hydropower plant, a pairing aimed at solving the African host's chronic power-supply problem while serving American AI compute demand. The U.S. company behind the $6.2 billion deal was not disclosed in the State Department's announcement. Officials call it the largest commercial transaction in Lesotho's history, more a measure of how thin the prior deal pipeline was than of how fat this one is.

A different deal pattern is showing up in Gabon. The U.S. Embassy there helped American firms secure about $600 million in business in 2025 and, this year, brokered a $100 million contract for two data centers and a gas-to-power plant against direct competition from Chinese bidders, according to Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Frank Garcia. The Gabon package matters less for its size than for what it shows about mechanism: the embassy was the dealmaker, not a passive visa-issuing post.

The Commercial Diplomacy Strategy was launched by the State Department's Bureau of African Affairs in early 2025 and rolled out in Abidjan by Ambassador Troy Fitrell on May 14, 2025. Its premise is that U.S. embassies on the continent should function as deal teams: matchmaking American firms with African governments, smoothing financing, and putting a thumb on the scale when Chinese state-backed bidders are in the room. The Lesotho and Gabon deals are the proof points. Africa's projected 2.5 billion people and $16 trillion-plus in purchasing power by 2050 are the pitch.

The figures are administration-reported. The 37-transaction, $25.67 billion tally comes from the Bureau of African Affairs via a Fox News Digital interview with Garcia on August 2; no independent African government, multilateral lender, or outside think tank has validated the specific deal list. The headline number is the State Department's accounting of its own program. Read it as that.

U.S. exports to sub-Saharan Africa climbed 23% to $22.6 billion in 2025, a real export-side result, and Garcia told Fox News Digital that nine of the world's 20 fastest-growing economies sit on the continent. Those numbers survive independent verification. What they don't survive is the "beating China" framing the wire headline tries to sell. Trade volume, not deal volume, is the measure that actually moves goods, ports, and jobs, and on that measure the gap is roughly 4-to-1 in Beijing's favor.

Two pieces of counter-pressure sit alongside the deal tally. Garcia, in the same interview, framed China's Africa play as one that seeks to "trap, coerce and undermine" African partners. It is partisan administration rhetoric, but it tracks a real debate inside African capitals about Chinese lending terms and infrastructure-for-debt arrangements, and it should be read as a U.S. bid for those governments' attention, not as adjudicated fact. On the American side, several U.S. states have moved to clamp down on new data-center builds over electricity and water use, a constraint that pushes more American compute capacity abroad, including toward African grids, but also signals that the U.S. domestic buildout is no longer frictionless.

The Bureau of African Affairs' next milestone is the one worth watching: a fresh round of embassy-brokered contracts in 2026, and the first independent read on whether the 37-deal tally holds up outside the State Department's own ledger. If the Lesotho project breaks ground and the Gabon gas-to-power plant delivers power, the targeted-inroad story is real. If the deals remain announcement-stage and the bilateral trade gap widens again, "Commercial Diplomacy" is a sales pitch the numbers won't back.