Nigeria’s digital infrastructure drive received a major boost as cloud infrastructure company Kasi Cloud unveiled the first phase of its planned 100-megawatt artificial intelligence-ready hyperscale data centre campus in Lekki, Lagos.
The facility, described as one of Nigeria’s most ambitious investments in local computing infrastructure, is designed to support artificial intelligence workloads, cloud computing, enterprise storage, and other high-density digital services amid growing global demand for AI capacity.
The project, estimated to cost about $250m, began with groundwork in April 2022, while major construction started in the second quarter of 2023.
The newly commissioned phase marks the first operational deployment of a broader campus that the company plans to expand into a 100MW digital infrastructure ecosystem.
Speaking during a media briefing in Lagos, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Kasi Cloud, Johnson Agogbua, said the project was aimed at reducing Africa’s dependence on foreign digital infrastructure by building local capacity to power next-generation AI systems.
“What we’re most proud of is the role that our people and our team have played,” Agogbua said.
“Almost every other data centre built here was designed by others for us. Kasi is Nigeria proper. Africa proper.”
Nigeria currently operates about 17 data centres, most of which function below 25 megawatts capacity. Kasi Cloud said the Lekki facility is expected to significantly increase the country’s computing capacity and reduce reliance on foreign-hosted digital infrastructure.
The company disclosed that the first deployment includes a 5.5MW data hall alongside a 7.5MW ecosystem floor designed to accommodate local and international businesses seeking colocation, cloud hosting, storage, and networking services.
Agogbua explained that the ecosystem floor would offer businesses flexibility in leasing infrastructure based on their operational needs.
“It’s an opportunity for our international partners, local partners, and local businesses to take up anything between a single node and a rack to a full aisle of IT workloads,” he said.
Also speaking, Global Director of Marketing and Sales Operations at Kasi Cloud, Ngozika Agogbua, described the project as part of Africa’s efforts to gain greater control over its digital future.
“Africa has become one of the fastest-growing digital markets in the world,” she said.
“Yet when it comes to artificial intelligence, the continent still operates with less than one per cent of global compute capacity.”
She warned that Africa’s continued dependence on foreign infrastructure comes at a significant economic and strategic cost, particularly as businesses increasingly rely on AI technologies.
“Every time an African business runs an AI workload, the data travels to a server in Europe or America,” she said.
“The economic and strategic cost of that dependency is enormous and largely invisible.”
According to the company, the facility is being developed to support GPU-intensive AI computing while also serving as a carrier-neutral interconnection hub for telecommunications operators and submarine cable providers.
Agogbua added that the upper floors of the campus were specifically designed to host hyperscale cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft as they expand into West Africa.
“Players like AWS, Google and Microsoft find it difficult to enter new markets and build at scale,” he said.
“We have both the power and the space they need to expand.”
The company further revealed that the campus has a dedicated 132-kilovolt substation capable of scaling deployments to about 100MW of IT load, positioning it among the region’s largest planned AI-ready computing facilities.
Agogbua stressed that Nigeria’s ability to compete in the global digital economy would depend on investments in local AI-supporting infrastructure.
“If we’re going to really embrace digital and employ AI-related systems to leapfrog into modernity, we need facilities of this scale,” he said.
He also called for policies that would encourage global technology firms to establish local operations while ensuring Nigerian engineers and developers are actively involved in the ecosystem.
A major theme during the briefing was data sovereignty, as company executives warned that Africa could remain dependent on foreign-owned AI systems without sustained investment in local computing infrastructure.
“Will the brain that will run the future be on our soil?” Agogbua asked.
“Or are we going to be renting it?”
