Moves by the Nigerian government to build a digital economy are beginning to gain traction as private investors continue to explore the country’s data centre space. At the last count, the country has seen four new data centre facilities sited on its shores over the last five months.
This development is racking up foreign investments in the country’s ICT sector, which had suffered a steady decline in FDIs over the past four years according to the data from the National Bureau of Statistics.
A data centre is a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings, used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. While some of these facilities have been completed and are actively in operation, others are still under construction.
The new data centres
Just last week, a Nigerian data company, Kasi Cloud Ltd., held a ground-breaking ceremony in Lekki, Lagos, to begin the construction of the company’s first data centre in Nigeria. The company says it has acquired 4 hectares of land in the Maiyegun Area of Lekki, Lagos for the $250 million campus designed to hyperscale requirements and standards and modelled similar to Silicon Valley technology parks.
The company is backed by the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA), an investment institution of the government set up to manage funds in excess of budgeted hydrocarbon revenues.
Similarly, earlier this month, telecommunications operator, Airtel Nigeria also unveiled its tier 3 certified data centre in the Lekki area of Lagos. for commercial use, declaring its mission to help provide perfect uptime and peerless security for servers it houses as well as cloud services for businesses and government establishments across the country.
Awarded the high-end Tier 3 ANSI/TIA-942 certification by EPI, the world’s leading certification body for data centres, the Airtel ultra-modern data centre runs on superior technology that enables it to perform efficiently in Nigeria’s tropical climate while also providing multiple paths and backups to its users.
In the same vein, at the event marking the landing of Google’s Equiano cable in Lagos last week, the West Indian Ocean Cable Company’s (WIOCC) announced the construction of its Open Access Data Centres (OADC) also in the Lekki area of Lagos. According to the company, the US$200mn, Tier III certified data centre aims to support a site power load of up to 20MW across more than 7,200 square metres of white space – sufficient for up to 3,275 racks and making it one of the largest facilities on the continent outside South Africa. In addition, the data centre, which is expected to be operational later this year has a power load that is fully scalable to 40MW as market demand grows.
In November last year, Africa Data Centres opened its new 10MW data centre facility in Lagos, its first in Nigeria. According to the CEO of the company, Stephane Duproz, the facility was built in response to the massive demand from hyperscalers, key cloud operators, and multi-national enterprises that were already using its data centres outside the country and had expressed interest in being a part of bringing digitization at scale to West Africa.
What they are saying
At the ground-breaking ceremony of its data centre in Lagos, the Chief Executive Officer of Kasi Cloud Ltd., Johnson Agogbua said: “Kasi’s mission of building a digital platform to accelerate cloud and interconnect people, enterprises and governmental institutions in Nigeria and across Africa started here in Lagos, Nigeria.”
According to the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Airtel Nigeria, Surendran Chemmenkotil, “the launch of Airtel data centre for commercial use is in response to our overarching objective of promoting digital inclusion as well as creating unfettered access and opportunities for entrepreneurs, businesses, and other organizations to enjoy premium data centre services in a world class and reliable facility.”
The CEO of Africa Data Centre, Stephane Duproz, said: “Nigeria is one of the company’s key markets as there is a rapidly-growing demand for data centres in the region, which is hungry for digitisation, as organisations of every type and size in Africa accelerate their digital transformation journeys.
As part of the recently launched Cassava Technologies group, Africa Data Centres plays a critical role when it comes to providing this very digital infrastructure that is needed to support the mass adoption of digital services for consumers and businesses in the region. This facility is the first of four faculties being earmarked for Nigeria; we have plans to also build an additional facility in Lagos at a separate location to ensure full disaster backup, whilst Abuja, and Port Harcourt will also get their own facilities.”
Why it matters
- Before now, while there were about 11 data centres in the country, the main commercial multi-tenant data centre providers are Rack Centre, MDXi owned by Main One, (both Tier III certified).
- Through the National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy (NDEPS 2020-2030), Nigeria is pushing for an economy that is fully digitised by the year 2030. By that time, all government services are expected to be accessible online such that the citizens would not need to be physically present in any government office for its services. This requires standard data centres with huge capacity to sustain.
- Aside from the drive to take all government services to the internet, virtually all businesses now require a server to store their data and such servers needed to be accessible 24/7, which can only be achieved by hosting with a tier 3 data centre.
- The growing fintech and startups ecosystem needs a vibrant data centre to survive. Until now, many of such ventures host their data outside the country as the fear of reliability and scalability forces businesses to look elsewhere.
- However, with the attention of international data centre operators shifting to the country, the sector is becoming more robust and confidence in hosting locally is rising.
