Airtel Nigeria is making a $120 million bet on artificial intelligence. The telecom giant says its upcoming 38-megawatt data centre, now under construction at Eko Atlantic and scheduled to come online in 2026, will power Nigeria’s AI ambitions by providing much-needed local compute capacity.
The facility recently received its first batch of high-performance GPUs, essential for training AI models, according to Dinesh Balsingh, Airtel Nigeria CEO.
“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,” he said at a media briefing on Tuesday.
Airtel Nigeria is adopting a different market strategy for its data centre business, unlike its main competitor, MTN Nigeria, which recently launched a $120 million data centre and cloud services to address the country’s growing cloud demands. While cloud storage is still part of Airtel’s plan, the telco prioritises AI compute capacity to close a gap in the country’s foundational AI infrastructure needs.
When Nigeria unveiled its draft National AI Strategy in 2024, stakeholders argued that the vision depended on affordable, localised compute infrastructure. They emphasised the need for modern data centres with accelerated computing, data, and model stacks.
Despite their importance, Nigeria currently has about 16 operational data centres, far fewer than countries like South Africa and Kenya, with a combined 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), at a recent public event.
The gap has spurred fresh investment from players including Airtel, MTN, and Equinix. According to Ogo Ofomata, director of Airtel Business, Airtel’s hyperscale facility will match the capabilities of major global cloud providers.
“We are going to host large enterprises as well as SMEs,” she said, hinting at ambitions in the country’s cloud market, currently valued at around $1 billion.
While cloud services remain on the table, AI remains the main play for Balsingh. “Cloud is fine. You need to have storage for the cloud, but that is a small part. Data centres are actually for artificial intelligence,” he added.
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