In a landmark move to strengthen Africa’s digital sovereignty, four international technology firms, Lakeba Group (Australia), Next Digital (Nigeria), AqlanX (UAE), and Agentic Dynamic (Netherlands), have formed a joint venture named AfricAI.
The initiative, which will begin operations in Nigeria as its flagship market, aims to build enterprise-grade AI solutions tailored to African realities. AfricAI will leverage existing national data centers and edge infrastructure to deploy applications in healthcare, digital identity, document automation, public administration, and enterprise services.
According to the founding partners, the collaboration combines four key strengths: global IP, regional expertise, deployment capabilities, and next-generation agentic AI architecture. The goal is to develop a sovereign and inclusive AI ecosystem that is designed in Africa, for Africa.
AfricAI envisions a distributed, interoperable AI network that can be applied across agriculture, education, urban planning, and public services. By 2026, the venture plans to expand into Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Rwanda, while training over 100 regional AI professionals to strengthen local capacity.
The partnership also includes plans to establish a Center of Excellence (CoE) in Nigeria to nurture AI talent in areas such as cybersecurity, model tuning, and the ethical deployment of AI. This aligns with national data residency requirements, ensuring AI workloads are processed and governed locally.
Speaking on the launch, Prince Malik Ado-Ibrahim, Chairman of Next Digital, said:
“At Next Digital, we’re not just deploying AI, we’re shaping it to reflect who we are as Nigerians and Africans. AfricAI is about more than software.
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It’s about exporting our intelligence, building our future on our terms, and making Africa a force in the global AI conversation. Nigeria will lead that movement, and we are ready.”
Lakeba Group CEO, Giuseppe Porcelli, described Nigeria as “the ideal launchpad for building a truly African AI ecosystem,” while AqlanX founder Demetrio Russo emphasised the importance of localisation, multilingual compliance, and digital trust. Eren Sivasli, Chairman of Agentic Dynamic, added that the collaboration would focus on scalable automation that enhances human workflows.
With its initial deployments, AfricAI plans to roll out sovereign AI for identity and compliance, knowledge automation, agentic AI assistants, multilingual citizen services, and secure smart document validation. The joint venture also intends to accelerate public-private partnerships across government, fintech, healthcare, and smart infrastructure.
AfricAI’s long-term mission is clear: to position Africa as an active developer of trusted AI infrastructure that reflects local needs while contributing to the global AI landscape.
