“When we say critical load, we mean the things that go to computers, routers and storage devices,” he said.

According to him, each floor of the facility is capable of supporting approximately eight megawatts of critical load, while a single building on the campus could ultimately scale to more than 30 megawatts.

“That’s bigger than power delivered to some small cities in Nigeria,” he said.

He argued that Nigeria’s ability to compete in the digital economy will increasingly depend on whether the country can develop infrastructure capable of supporting AI systems locally.

“If we’re going to really embrace digital and employ AI-related systems to leapfrog into modernity, we need facilities of this scale,” he said.

Agogbua said Nigeria missed earlier phases of industrialisation but could still leapfrog economically through rapid adoption of modern digital infrastructure and AI technologies.

“We can digitise early, apply modern tech and leapfrog into it,” he said. “It requires facilities of this scale. It requires deployment of this scale.”

He also urged policymakers to create conditions that encourage international technology companies to establish local operations while ensuring Nigerian talent participates directly in the ecosystem.

“Make it easy for them to enter,” he said. “But require them to have us working on it. That’s how we get training.”

A major theme throughout the briefing was data sovereignty and concerns that Africa risks remaining dependent on foreign-owned AI systems if local compute infrastructure is not developed.

Agogbua argued that African languages, culture, commerce and historical records may become under-represented in future AI models if the continent does not build domestic infrastructure and local AI ecosystems.

“Will the brain that will run the future be on our soil?” he asked. “Or are we going to be renting it?”

He said AI systems shaping future digital experiences should increasingly be developed and operated within African cities rather than entirely from technology hubs in North America, Europe or Asia.

“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.”

Agogbua said the company established an internal training initiative known as Kasi Academy to develop local engineering talent capable of supporting advanced digital infrastructure projects.

“When people asked how we would replicate world-class execution, we said we would grow them,” he said.

According to him, many of the engineers working on the project were trained internally through the academy, with Nigerian teams directly involved in designing and deploying key systems across the facility.

“The final design, the final rendering, is done here,” he said.

While acknowledging that some equipment and specialised manufacturing capabilities still need to be sourced internationally, he maintained that Africa already possesses the technical talent needed to build sophisticated infrastructure locally.

Beyond enterprise cloud infrastructure, Agogbua linked AI deployment to broader economic transformation across Nigeria’s informal economy, including retail markets, healthcare delivery, logistics and inventory management.