Infastructuring the last mile: State, Chinese tech, and densification of Ghana's rural network

China's infrastructure footprint is expanding to rural Africa with a growing number of last-mile initiatives to address the digital divide. Supported by Huawei's RuralStar base station solution and financed by a Chinese loan, Ghana rolled out a large-scale rural telephony project (RTP) to densify its mobile network in 2020. Drawing from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper elucidates the multi-layered yet contradictory techno-politics of datafying the last mile in Ghana. Viewing RTP as a means to restore its political legitimacy in the twenty-first century, the Ghanaian state politicizes the digital divide to boost rural development. Telecom operators see RTP as a source of value creation and constantly negotiate the location and datafication of the rural sites. To mitigate geopolitical risks, Huawei strategically de-politicizes the project and reduces its local participation. Approaching RTP as data-infrastructure-in-the-making, this paper illustrates how it assembles political, commercial, and ecological forces to connect the last mile, which entails three types of data relations with regard to state, market, and nature. This paper contributes to infrastructure studies and critical data studies by bringing the environmental politics into the theorization of last-mile datafication. It presents an infrastructural lens to observe the dynamics of Africa–China tech engagement and sheds new light on the intricate entanglements between state, infrastructure, and nature.