Nigerian companies are spending about $850 million annually on foreign cloud services, embedding the country’s fast-growing digital economy into infrastructure located thousands of kilometres away and increasingly exposed to geopolitical risk.
That risk came into sharp focus in March 2026, when Iranian drone strikes hit AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain.
Though Nigeria recorded no immediate outages, banking apps functioned, fintech transactions cleared, and government platforms remained online.
But the incident has forced a strategic ret
