Nigeria is positioning itself to become a major cloud computing and digital infrastructure hub in West Africa as the federal government moves to attract global technology companies and local infrastructure developers into the country’s rapidly expanding digital economy.
The Director-General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, who disclosed this at the ITW Data Cloud Africa 2026 in Nairobi, Kenya, said the government was developing a policy and regulatory framework designed to provide investment certainty, stimulate structured demand and establish a sovereign cloud ecosystem capable of supporting Nigeria’s growing population and the wider region.
Speaking at a workshop titled, “Nigeria’s Digital Infrastructure Opportunity,” Inuwa said the initiative was aimed at addressing the country’s dependence on offshore digital infrastructure despite the huge domestic demand for cloud computing and other digital services.
According to him, local data capacity is already operating at nearly 90 per cent utilisation, making it imperative for Nigeria to accelerate investment in data centres, cloud infrastructure and related technologies.
He explained that the government was leveraging its purchasing power to create an anchor market for investors through the newly institutionalised Cloud-First Policy, which seeks to consolidate public-sector technology spending and redirect it towards shared cloud infrastructure rather than fragmented investments by individual government institutions.
Inuwa disclosed that 326 federal ministries, departments and agencies spent N3.89 trillion, equivalent to about $2.9 billion, on technology investments between 2023 and mid-2026.
He added that government demand alone generates almost $1 billion annually, stressing that the spending represented a significant opportunity to create a predictable market for private infrastructure developers.
Rather than allowing individual government institutions to continue establishing isolated data centres and technology platforms, he said the new approach would encourage shared architecture and greater private-sector participation.
Regulatory Certainty
Inuwa also identified regulatory uncertainty and overlapping mandates among government agencies as some of the challenges confronting investors in Nigeria’s digital infrastructure sector.
He said NITDA was working towards a unified regulatory framework that would provide investors with a single interface for navigating compliance requirements across government agencies.
According to him, the agency is developing a single-interface portal to simplify regulatory compliance and eliminate unnecessary duplication.
He explained that the horizontal regulatory framework would enable sector-specific regulators to adopt common baseline standards while retaining requirements peculiar to their respective sectors.
Using the financial sector as an example, Inuwa said the Central Bank of Nigeria could build on the common regulatory framework to establish requirements for financial institutions without creating additional layers of approval.
He said the approach would make it easier for financial institutions and other businesses to migrate appropriate workloads to local cloud platforms while reducing regulatory bottlenecks.
The NITDA DG stressed that the regulatory framework was designed to create markets and stimulate investment rather than generate revenue from businesses.
He said the government’s objective was to promote competition, encourage innovation and ensure that Nigeria’s digital infrastructure could interoperate with systems across other markets.
Cloud Market Expansion
According to Inuwa, the economic fundamentals underpinning Nigeria’s digital infrastructure strategy are compelling.
He said broadband penetration had recently risen by almost 10 percentage points to above 56 per cent, while the country had approximately 192 million mobile subscribers and 157 million internet users.
He further cited projections indicating that Nigeria’s domestic cloud market could expand from about $376 million in 2026 to more than $783 million by 2031.
Inuwa said the potential economic returns from digital infrastructure investment were equally significant, noting that existing research estimated that every dollar invested in Nigeria’s digital infrastructure could generate about $8 in broader economic returns.
He maintained that clearer government policies and more predictable regulation could accelerate the development of the market and attract additional private capital.
Regional Ambition
Beyond the Nigerian market, the government is seeking to position the country as a digital infrastructure gateway to West and Central Africa.
Inuwa said Nigeria’s geographical location, large consumer market, growing technology ecosystem and connectivity infrastructure provided a strong foundation for serving neighbouring countries, including landlocked markets.
Under the National Digital Cloud Policy, the government is targeting $750 million in digital infrastructure investments over the next two years, beginning with a target of $250 million in private capital during the first year.
The strategy, he explained, would also involve greater harmonisation of digital standards with other African countries to facilitate cross-border data transfers and mutual recognition of compliance requirements.
According to him, establishing common standards would enable African countries to retain greater control over their data while allowing businesses to deploy cloud services across national borders without being subjected to repetitive compliance procedures.
He said the objective was to promote digital sovereignty by ensuring that African countries had greater control over how their data was stored, secured and processed while still benefiting from regional digital connectivity.
Inuwa therefore urged global technology companies, data centre operators, cloud providers, financial institutions and infrastructure investors to take advantage of the opportunities emerging from Nigeria’s digital transformation agenda.
He said the government was prepared to work with private capital to build secure, scalable and interconnected digital infrastructure capable of supporting Nigeria’s digital economy and strengthening its role as a technology hub for the continent.
