Nigeria has the capacity to support local financial and AI workloads 

Nigeria’s data localisation conversation has reopened an important question about the country’s digital infrastructure readiness: Can critical financial, enterprise, public-sector and AI workloads be hosted locally at scale?

For Gbenga Adegbiji, chief executive officer of Geniserve, a digital infrastructure construction firm, the answer is not that Nigeria lacks capacity. Rather, Nigeria is entering a new phase in which its existing computing, data centres, cloud, connectivity and power reforms must be coordinated more deliberately to support sustainable digital growth.

In this interview with ROYAL IBEH, Adegbiji discusses the Central Bank of Nigeria’s data localisation directive, the readiness of local data centres, the importance of infrastructure sovereignty, Nigeria’s power-sector reforms, Project Bridge, sovereign cloud domiciliation efforts, and why the country’s digital transformation requires participation from government, regulators, DFIs, cloud providers, network operators, financial institutions and the private sector. Excerpts…

The localisation directive has sparked a major debate about whether Nigeria is ready to host critical financial data locally. What does this policy signal to you?

The policy signals that data infrastructure is now becoming part of national economic infrastructure. It is no longer just an IT issue.

When a regulator like the Central Bank says payment transaction data generated in Nigeria should be stored and managed locally, it is saying that data has strategic value. It is saying that the systems supporting banking, payments, fintech and financial services are too important to sit entirely outside the country’s operational and supervisory reach.

But the directive also raises a practical infrastructure question. It is not enough to say data should be local. We must have the infrastructure to host it, secure it, back it up, monitor it and keep it available. That means local data centres, cloud platforms, connectivity, cybersecurity, disaster recovery and skilled operators all have to work together.

Fortunately, Nigeria has made considerable progress in creating local capacity.

For me, the CBN policy is not only about compliance. It is a major demand signal for Nigeria’s local cloud and data centre ecosystem.

Some people have raised concerns about whether local data centres are ready for this kind of workload. How do you respond to that?

I think we need to separate general concerns about the Nigerian environment from the capability of professionally operated data centres.

Yes, Nigeria has challenges, especially around power reliability and public infrastructure. But serious data centre operators understand what uptime means. They understand power redundancy, cooling, security, monitoring, failover and disaster recovery. They are not designing for ideal conditions. They are designing for the realities of this market.

The idea that, because Nigeria has power challenges, a professional data centre cannot operate reliably is not accurate. Nigerian operators have had to engineer around power for years and have become very strong at it. They have spent years designing around grid instability, creating operating models that rely on redundancy, backup systems, generator control, batteries, monitoring, maintenance and disciplined power management.

That experience matters. It means the best local operators understand resilience in a very practical way, shaped by the realities of our operating environment.

You said Nigerian operators may understand how to engineer power resilience better than many operators in more stable markets. Can you explain that?

In some markets, grid power is very stable, so backup power is treated as a short-duration contingency. In Nigeria, you cannot think that way. You have to assume that power disruption can happen regularly, sometimes multiple times within a day. So you have to size your power capacity and equipment accordingly.

That means multiple layers of backup. It means generators, fuel logistics, batteries, inverters, monitoring, maintenance, failover processes and operational discipline. You have to know what happens when one layer fails. You have to design for continuity, not just backup.

So, when people talk about power as a weakness, I understand the concern. But the other side is that our operating environment has forced serious infrastructure providers to become very strong in resilience design.

For mission-critical workloads such as banking and payments, that is important. You want operators that understand power systems operationally.

How do recent power-sector reforms change the outlook for Nigeria’s digital infrastructure market?

Nigeria is taking important steps to deregulate and liberalise power. That matters because digital infrastructure depends heavily on reliable and scalable energy. By empowering state governments to develop local power options, Nigeria can begin to create more practical energy solutions around industrial clusters, technology parks, data centres and major infrastructure corridors. This is very important for data centres, cloud platforms, enterprise systems and AI workloads.

Power will remain one of the biggest issues worldwide. In the US, power availability delays can slow projects down by up to 10 years. In Nigeria, we can work around that with the available options. When the reforms are implemented properly, they can support more local generation, more distributed energy solutions and more reliable infrastructure for compute-heavy workloads.

For data centres and cloud providers, this is not a small issue. AI workloads, financial systems, public-sector platforms and enterprise applications all require stable power. So electricity liberalisation is directly connected to Nigeria’s cloud, data centre, and AI future.

How does this relate to data sovereignty?

Data sovereignty cannot exist without infrastructure sovereignty. It is one thing to say data must remain within the country. But where will that data sit? Who will operate the infrastructure? Who will secure it? Who will monitor access? Who will recover it if something goes wrong? Who will guarantee uptime?

These are the elements of what I call infrastructure sovereignty. If these capabilities do not exist locally, then data sovereignty becomes a slogan. Real sovereignty requires local capacity: data centres, cloud platforms, interconnection, cybersecurity, disaster recovery, operational processes and skilled people.

The CBN directive is important and timely because it moves the conversation from theory to practical implementation. It forces the ecosystem to ask where critical data lives and whether we have the systems to manage it properly.

Does local data hosting mean financial institutions must completely abandon global cloud platforms?

Not necessarily. The conversation should not be reduced to local versus foreign cloud. That is not what the idea is.

Many banks and fintechs use global cloud platforms because they offer scale, tooling, automation and reliability. That reality should be acknowledged. But regulated financial data has compliance, sovereignty and supervisory implications. So, the question is how to design the right architecture.

What matters is that the architecture complies with regulation, protects the data, supports uptime and gives the regulator the visibility it needs.

Where do local data centres fit into this transition?

Local data centres are critical because they provide the physical and operational foundation for local cloud, data sovereignty and regulated digital services. But a data centre is not just a building with servers. A proper data centre includes resilient power, cooling, security, network redundancy, fire suppression, monitoring, access controls, compliance processes and skilled operations.

For the CBN policy, this is important because payment transaction data is not ordinary data. It is linked to financial stability, consumer trust, regulatory oversight, economic activity and national security. The infrastructure hosting that data must be resilient.

Local data centres give banks, fintechs and payment operators a way to host critical systems within Nigeria while still meeting uptime, security and operational requirements.

What about disaster recovery and the use of multiple data centres?

That is very important.

No serious financial institution should concentrate all critical infrastructure in one location. Resilience requires architecture. You may have a primary environment in one data centre and disaster recovery in another. You may have replication between sites. You may have backup arrangements and failover processes. This is the standard architecture.

This is already part of how many banks think. The question now is how to extend that discipline across the wider financial technology ecosystem, especially fintechs and payment operators that may have grown up entirely on public cloud platforms. The CBN directive should push the market to think about local resilience, capacity development and the needed investments for sustenance.

Beyond data centres, what other infrastructure developments should we be paying attention to?

We should pay attention to the wider infrastructure base that supports computing.

Data centres are important, but they depend on power, connectivity, interconnection and policy coordination. Nigeria’s Project Bridge national backbone is important because long-haul fibre and national connectivity are foundational for cloud, AI, enterprise systems and digital public services.

If you want financial institutions, government platforms, startups, researchers and enterprises to use local computing infrastructure, they must be able to connect reliably to that infrastructure. That is why the national open-access backbone project of such a scale, and the 3MTT skilling project, matters.

We also need to look at sovereign cloud domiciliation efforts. If Nigeria wants sensitive public-sector, financial, revenue and citizen data to be hosted locally, then the country needs trusted cloud and data centre environments that meet the right standards.

There is also a role for development finance institutions and the private sector. These are capital-intensive projects. DFIs, local investors, banks, infrastructure funds and private operators all have to participate.

The good thing is that Nigeria is already on the path of digital transformation. The problems are there, but they are now being addressed, and the direction is very positive.

What role do companies like Geniserve play in making this transition possible?

Geniserve sits in the practical implementation layer. We help translate infrastructure plans into working systems. That can involve managed infrastructure, network deployment, systems integration, operations support, field services, power solutions, enterprise connectivity, maintenance and support.

In the context of the CBN directive, this layer is important because financial institutions and fintechs will need more than policy interpretation. They will need practical implementation support. They will need people who can design, deploy, connect, monitor, maintain and troubleshoot infrastructure. They will need operators who understand the local environment and can work across power, connectivity, security and operations. They need execution capacity and local experience.

That is where companies like Geniserve play a role. We design, build and project-manage large-scale digital infrastructure projects such as data centres and connectivity solutions for governments, enterprises and development finance institutions (DFIs).

What should regulators and policymakers take from the CBN example?

The lesson is that policy and infrastructure must move together. Policy initiates the move, and with the right implementation, the entire ecosystem develops, and all stakeholders benefit from that development.

If you issue a data localisation directive, you also need implementation guidance. You need clarity on standards, timelines, transition pathways, audit requirements, disaster recovery expectations and acceptable architectures.

You also need to engage the infrastructure ecosystem. Data centres, cloud providers, network operators, cybersecurity firms, banks, fintechs and managed service providers all need to be part of the conversation.

Policy will create the demand, and strategic implementation and cooperation among all stakeholders will ensure the right development and benefits.

What is the opportunity if Nigeria gets this right?

If Nigeria gets it right, the country can create a much stronger local digital infrastructure market. Loudoun County in Virginia became one of the world’s most important data centre hubs because the right conditions came together: land, power, connectivity, demand, investment and policy support. But we are also seeing how power constraints, land availability and community concerns are slowing new data centre developments in major global markets.

That creates an opportunity for countries like Nigeria.

Nigeria has the market size, financial services demand, enterprise workloads, public-sector digitisation and emerging AI requirements to become a serious hub for data centres and cloud infrastructure.

Nigeria has the land; we have the population and natural gas in abundance. The proposed Project Bridge also means that large-scale AI data centres can be built in the Niger Delta region and closer to power-generating stations without the risk of unreliable connectivity. This is how sustainable economies are built from the ground up.

The financial sector and other sectors can become anchor customers for local cloud and data centre capacity. That can support more investment, better infrastructure, more skilled jobs and stronger resilience. It can also give regulators better visibility into critical financial data and improve national digital trust.

More importantly, Nigeria can show other African countries how to connect data sovereignty policy with infrastructure development.

The country has substantial local compute potential across financial services, enterprise workloads, public-sector systems and AI. With power-sector liberalisation, Project Bridge, sovereign cloud efforts, development finance institutions and private-sector participation, Nigeria is on a path towards more sustainable digital infrastructure growth. That is the real opportunity.