Kasi Cloud has launched the first operational phase of its planned 100-megawatt hyperscale data centre campus in Lekki, Lagos, in what is being described as one of the boldest private investments yet in Nigeria’s digital infrastructure space.
The facility, designed to support artificial intelligence operations, cloud services, enterprise storage and high-density computing, comes at a time global demand for AI-ready infrastructure is growing rapidly.
The project, valued at roughly $250 million, began with a groundbreaking ceremony in April 2022, while large-scale construction commenced in the second quarter of 2023. The newly commissioned phase represents the first live deployment within what the company intends to expand into a full-scale 100MW digital infrastructure ecosystem.
Nigeria currently operates an estimated 17 data centres, most of them below 25 megawatts in capacity. Kasi Cloud believes the Lekki campus could significantly strengthen local computing power and reduce reliance on foreign-hosted digital infrastructure.
Speaking during a media briefing in Lagos on Saturday, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Kasi Cloud, Johnson Agogbua, said the project was built around the idea of giving Africa greater control over its digital future.
“What we’re most proud of is the role that our people and our team have played,” he said. “Almost every other data centre built here was designed by others for us. Kasi is Nigeria proper. Africa proper.”
According to the company, the first deployment includes a 5.5MW data hall alongside a 7.5MW ecosystem floor created for local and international businesses seeking colocation, cloud hosting, networking and storage solutions.
Agogbua explained that the ecosystem floor allows companies to scale according to their operational needs, whether they require a single server node, a rack or an entire aisle for IT workloads.
“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.
Also speaking at the briefing, Global Director of Marketing and Sales Operations at Kasi Cloud, Ngozika Agogbua, described the project as a strategic move positioned at the intersection of technology, economics and geopolitics.
“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 African businesses continue to lose both data value and economic opportunities because most AI workloads are processed on servers located abroad.
“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 believes the Lekki campus could become part of a broader transformation in Africa’s digital economy, similar to the impact mobile telecommunications and submarine cable infrastructure had on internet connectivity across the continent over the last two decades.
Kasi Cloud said the facility is also being designed to support GPU-intensive AI computing while serving as a carrier-neutral hub connecting telecom operators and submarine cable providers.
Agogbua noted that upper floors within the campus were specifically built with hyperscale cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft in mind as they expand deeper into 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 operates with a dedicated 132-kilovolt substation capable of supporting up to 100 megawatts of IT load when fully expanded, making it one of the region’s largest planned AI-ready computing facilities.
Agogbua repeatedly stressed the importance of “critical load” the electricity supplied directly to servers, storage systems and networking infrastructure noting that each floor could support roughly eight megawatts of critical load.
According to him, a single building on the campus could eventually scale beyond 30 megawatts.
“That’s bigger than power delivered to some small cities in Nigeria,” he said.
He argued that if Nigeria intends to compete in the modern digital economy, it must build infrastructure capable of supporting AI systems locally rather than depending entirely on foreign platforms.
“If we’re going to really embrace digital and employ AI-related systems to leapfrog into modernity, we need facilities of this scale,” he stated.
Agogbua added that although Nigeria missed earlier waves of industrialisation, the country still has an opportunity to accelerate growth through digital technology and artificial intelligence.
“We can digitise early, apply modern tech and leapfrog into it,” he said.
He also urged policymakers to create a more enabling environment for global technology companies entering the Nigerian market while ensuring local professionals benefit from training and participation opportunities.
“Make it easy for them to enter,” he said. “But require them to have us working on it. That’s how we get training.”
Another major issue raised during the briefing was data sovereignty and the fear that Africa could remain dependent on foreign-owned AI systems if local infrastructure development continues to lag behind.
Agogbua warned that African languages, culture, commerce and historical identity risk becoming underrepresented in future AI models unless the continent develops its own infrastructure and talent ecosystem.
“Will the brain that will run the future be on our soil?” he asked. “Or are we going to be renting it?”
He argued that the engineers and developers shaping AI systems for African users should increasingly be based within African cities rather than overseas technology hubs.
“If those coding the model reside in San Francisco, Munich or Shanghai and documenting our language and culture, we’ll be lost,” he said. “They should be in Yaba, Abuja, Enugu, Kano, and all of our cities.”
The company also highlighted local engineering involvement in the project, describing Kasi Cloud as an African-led initiative rather than a foreign-built infrastructure deployment.
To support that vision, the company established an internal training programme known as Kasi Academy to groom local engineering talent for advanced digital infrastructure projects.
“When people asked how we would replicate world-class execution, we said we would grow them,” Agogbua explained.
He revealed that many engineers currently working on the project were trained internally, with Nigerian teams directly involved in designing and deploying key systems within the facility.
“The final design, the final rendering, is done here,” he said.
Although some specialised equipment still has to be sourced internationally, Agogbua maintained that Africa already possesses the technical expertise required to build sophisticated digital infrastructure.
Beyond enterprise cloud services, he linked AI adoption to wider economic opportunities across sectors such as healthcare, logistics, retail and inventory management, particularly within Nigeria’s informal economy.
“Go to the market and watch what’s going on,” he said. “Their ledger is on worn-out paper. Their inventory is in their brain. All those are opportunities.”
According to him, locally accessible AI infrastructure could help small businesses automate operations, improve forecasting and strengthen supply chains.
“That’s the opportunity for our boys and girls,” he added. “But infrastructure for it must be accessible to them.”
