Airtel Nigeria is investing $120 million in a new data centre designed to support artificial intelligence development across the country, with the company positioning the project as a critical piece of Nigeria’s digital infrastructure.
The 38-megawatt facility, currently under construction at Eko Atlantic in Lagos, is expected to go live in 2026. It will offer high-performance computing capacity tailored for training AI models, a capability long missing in Nigeria’s tech ecosystem. The project recently received its first batch of high-performance GPUs, Airtel Nigeria CEO Dinesh Balsingh said at a media briefing on Tuesday.
“If you want to make transformational change, we are talking about high-capacity data centres, which can take the load of artificial intelligence that Nigeria needs,” Balsingh said.
While cloud storage will be part of Airtel’s offerings, the telco is prioritising compute infrastructure tailored to AI. This marks a departure from its main competitor, MTN Nigeria, which recently launched its own $120 million data centre focused primarily on cloud services.
“Cloud is fine. You need to have storage for the cloud, but that is a small part. Data centres are actually for artificial intelligence,” Balsingh added.
The move comes amid growing demand for local compute power. When Nigeria’s government unveiled its draft National AI Strategy in 2024, policy stakeholders underscored the need for affordable, localised infrastructure to support data and model training. Industry leaders cited the lack of domestic accelerated computing capabilities as a major obstacle to deploying real-world AI solutions.
Nigeria currently operates only 16 data centres, far fewer than regional peers like South Africa and Kenya, which together host 75. “Xalam Analytics shows that Africa has 1% of the global digital infrastructure while having 17% of the world’s population and 4% of the global GDP,” said Ayotunde Coker, CEO of Open Access Data Centres (OADC), during a recent public forum.
The infrastructure gap is attracting new investment from multiple players including Equinix, MTN, and Airtel, as Africa races to scale its digital economy. Airtel’s hyperscale facility, according to Ogo Ofomata, director of Airtel Business, is being built to match global benchmarks.
“We are going to host large enterprises as well as SMEs,” Ofomata said, suggesting that Airtel’s infrastructure ambitions could extend into Nigeria’s growing $1 billion cloud services market.
Still, AI remains Airtel’s primary focus. Balsingh framed the facility not just as a commercial asset, but as a catalyst for national technological transformation.
