Maha Christopher
Nigeria’s push to strengthen its digital infrastructure received a major boost on Saturday as Kasi Cloud commissioned the first phase of its planned 100 megawatt AI ready hyperscale data centre campus in Lekki, Lagos.
The facility, regarded as one of the country’s most ambitious investments in local compute infrastructure, is designed to support artificial intelligence workloads, cloud computing, enterprise storage and other high density digital services amid rising global demand for AI capacity.
According to PUNCH, the project is estimated to cost about $250m, with groundwork beginning in April 2022 before major construction commenced in the second quarter of 2023.
The newly commissioned phase marks the first operational deployment within the wider campus, which the company plans to scale into a 100 megawatt digital infrastructure ecosystem over time.
Nigeria currently operates about 17 data centres, most of which function below 25 megawatts capacity. Kasi Cloud said the Lekki project is expected to significantly expand the country’s compute footprint while reducing dependence on foreign hosted infrastructure.
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Kasi Cloud, Johnson Agogbua, described the project as an effort to reverse Africa’s reliance on overseas digital infrastructure by building local capacity capable of powering next generation AI systems.
“What we’re most proud of is the role that our people and our team have played,” Agogbua said during a media briefing in Lagos.
“Almost every other data centre built here was designed by others for us. Kasi is Nigeria proper. Africa proper.”
The company disclosed that the first deployment includes a 5.5 megawatt data hall and a 7.5 megawatt ecosystem floor built to accommodate local and international businesses seeking colocation, cloud hosting, storage and networking services.
According to Agogbua, the ecosystem floor allows clients to lease infrastructure ranging from a single server node to an entire aisle of racks depending on 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.
Global Director of Marketing and Sales Operations at Kasi Cloud, Ngozika Agogbua, said the project represents more than a business expansion, describing it as part of Africa’s broader attempt 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 continued dependence on foreign infrastructure means African businesses export critical data and economic value whenever AI workloads are processed outside the continent.
“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.”
The company said the facility is also being designed to support GPU intensive AI computing workloads while functioning as a carrier neutral interconnection hub linking telecommunications operators and submarine cable providers.
Agogbua noted that the upper floors of the campus were specifically built for hyperscale cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft seeking expansion opportunities in 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 disclosed that the campus has a dedicated 132 kilovolt substation capable of scaling deployments to approximately 100 megawatts of IT load, positioning it among the largest planned AI ready compute facilities in the region.
Agogbua argued that Nigeria’s future competitiveness in the global digital economy would increasingly depend on its ability to develop infrastructure capable of supporting AI systems locally.
“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 urged policymakers to create policies that would encourage international technology companies to establish local operations while ensuring Nigerian engineers and developers actively participate in the ecosystem.
A major theme throughout the briefing was data sovereignty, with company executives warning that Africa risks remaining dependent on foreign owned AI systems if local compute infrastructure is not aggressively developed.
“Will the brain that will run the future be on our soil?” Agogbua asked. “Or are we going to be renting it?”
