Data centre operators have committed to investing at least $630 million in expanding capacity as internet consumption soars amid rising demand for local cloud.
Since 2019, Nigeria’s average monthly internet usage has surged by 699.79 percent to 1,000,930.6 terabytes in January 2025. This spike has been driven by increased adoption of digital services, especially streaming and social media platforms.
This has motivated MTN Nigeria and Airtel, who control 85.9 percent of the country’s mobile subscriber base, to ramp up data centre investments. In March 2024, Airtel broke ground on a hyper-scale data centre in Lagos to improve the speed of access to digital services and reduce data management costs.
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By June, MTN Nigeria unveiled plans to build a 1,500-rack, Tier 4 data centre to support rising data needs.
According to Mohammed Rufai, former chief technical officer at MTN Nigeria and now CEO of MTN Congo-Brazzaville, “Our facility will provide the space and services needed, enabling companies to digitalise their operations and improve efficiency.”
Data centres serve as the backbone of modern digital economies, ensuring secure storage, processing, and management of data. They also help localise content from global tech giants like Meta and Google, insulating the country from outages such as the widespread internet disruptions in the West African region caused by undersea cable breaks in early 2024.
To strengthen local resilience, especially in the face of increasing digitisation, three of the country’s largest data centre operators, Equinix, RackCentre, and Open Access Data Centres (OADC), have launched expansion projects.
Equinix, formerly MainOne, plans to spend $140 million expanding its facilities across southern Nigeria over the next two years. It is set to open Equinix LG3, its third data center in Lagos, and Equinix PR1, its first data center in Port Harcourt.
“Data centers play a pivotal role in driving economic development in Nigeria, serving as critical infrastructure that supports digital transformation and economic growth,” said Wole Abu, managing director of Equinix West Africa.
Similarly, OADC is investing $240 million to expand its Lagos data centre to 24 megawatts by 2027. The data centre is the landing station for Google’s Equiano subsea cable in Nigeria and currently runs at 1.5mw.
RackCentre recently commissioned a 12-Megawatt Artificial Intelligence-oriented data centre to complement the 1.5mw installed in its first facility. According to Lars Johanisson, chief executive officer of RackCentre, “Cloudification and digitalisation are not just buzzwords; they are a reality. The user behaviour in Nigeria is no different from anywhere else globally.”
Other investments in the pipeline include those of Kasi Cloud Limited, which has begun constructing a $250 million hyperscale data centre in Lekki, and Visa, which recently announced plans to establish a data centre in the country.
These operators’ investments aim to close the at least $600 million data centre gap the country has. Currently, Nigeria has 16 data centres, but it still trails African countries such as South Africa and Kenya.
Read also: How modular data centres can support Nigeria’s ICT growth
According to a report from Africa Data Centres, South Africa is expected to attract the bulk of the $5 billion set to flow into the continent’s data centre market by 2026.
“We do not have enough data centres,” said Ayotunde Coker, managing director, OADC. “We must build numerous data centres to bring data storage and processing closer to Africa, driving consumption and transforming lives and businesses.”
The growing demand for AI, high-performance computing and low-latency services are also placing a demand for more data centres. “AI is not just a buzzword anymore,” said Ezekiel Egboye, chief operating officer of RackCentre. “With AI, you require 10 to 20 times faster processing power than standard searches.”
Johannisson of RackCentre added, “The demand for data centres is growing, and Nigeria is moving in the right direction.”
