Equinix, the global data centre provider that acquired Nigeria’s MainOne, has announced plans to build a new $22 million data centre in Lagos, which would mark the company’s first newly constructed facility in West Africa.
The new data centre, christened LG3, is targeted at local businesses and international companies that are looking to scale into a country with strong digital infrastructure. It is scheduled to be opened and operational by the first quarter of 2026. The launch of this data centre is the first step in Equinix’s $100 million investment strategy in Africa that aims to transform the continent’s digital landscape over the next two years.
Lagos is the centre of Nigeria’s digital traffic with over 18 million active internet subscribers as of Q1 2024, the highest of any Nigerian state. The city hosts the highest concentration of enterprise customers, fintechs, banks, and telecom operators in the country. It is also where multiple subsea cable systems land, giving it an edge in global connectivity. The Nigerian data centre market is also projected to grow to over $684 million by 2030, with Lagos holding over 30% of the market share, which highlights the scale of demand and the potential for growth in the city.
“As Lagos emerges at the crossroads of talent, innovation, and global connectivity, this facility is accelerating access to technologies like cloud, AI, and the next wave of startups,” said Wole Abu, Managing Director for West Africa at Equinix
The new data centre will feature Equinix Fabric®, a service that allows businesses to connect their physical and virtual infrastructure to a global ecosystem of cloud service providers across more than 270 Equinix data centres worldwide.
The LG3 project is a key component of a much larger investment plan Equinix announced in April 2025, where Equinix expressed its interest in investing up to $140 million to expand digital infrastructure across southern Nigeria. The plan includes the construction of a new data centre in Port Harcourt, PR1, which is set to become the first landing station for Meta’s 2Africa subsea cable outside of Lagos and decentralise Nigeria’s internet capacity.
This is the latest strategic move from Equinix since it officially entered the West African market in April 2022 through its $320 million acquisition of MainOne, a provider of telecom services and network solutions in Africa. The deal gave Equinix access to MainOne’s assets, including multiple operational data centres in Nigeria, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, a 7,000‑kilometre submarine cable system linking Nigeria to Portugal, and over 1,200 km of terrestrial fibre across southern Nigeria.
The race to capture Nigeria’s digital future is accelerating as several players make significant investments in the sector, including telecoms giant MTN, which has committed over $240 million to build a 9 megawatt Tier 3 data centre to boost its local cloud offerings. Airtel Nigeria is also betting $120 million on its 38-megawatt data centre, now under construction in Lagos, to power Nigeria’s AI ambition. Meanwhile, Open Access Data Centres (OADC), a subsidiary of WIOCC Group, plans to expand its Lagos data centre to 24 megawatts by 2027 to meet the demand for cloud services.
With over 220 hyperscaler on-ramps in 45 metros and thousands of partners, Equinix’s platform boasts more than 4,000 customers globally and over 64,000 interconnections. The company is now bringing this extensive global platform and its rich interconnection possibilities to West Africa with the new Lagos facility.
“With the opening of our newest data centre in Lagos, Equinix is proud to invest in this dynamic region, supporting our customers’ growth with world-class data centres that power everything from banking and education to emergency services and commerce,” Aslıhan Güreşcier, Vice President, EMEA Growth & Emerging Markets at Equinix, said.
