Kasi Cloud has commissioned the first phase of its planned 100-megawatt AI-ready hyperscale data centre campus in Lekki, Lagos, marking one of Nigeria’s most ambitious investments yet in digital infrastructure and local compute capacity.

The company said the facility is designed to support artificial intelligence workloads, cloud computing, enterprise storage and high-density digital services at a time when global demand for AI infrastructure is accelerating rapidly.

The project, estimated to cost about $250m, broke ground in April 2022, while major construction work began in the second quarter of 2023. The commissioning marks the first operational deployment within the broader campus, which Kasi Cloud plans to scale over time into a 100MW data infrastructure ecosystem.

Nigeria currently has about 17 operational data centres, according to industry estimates, with most facilities operating below 25MW capacity. Kasi Cloud said the Lekki campus is intended to significantly expand the country’s compute footprint and reduce dependence on foreign-hosted infrastructure.

Founder and Chief Executive Officer Johnson Agogbua said the project is intended to help reverse Africa’s dependence on foreign digital infrastructure by creating local capacity capable of supporting the next generation of AI-driven applications.

“What we’re most proud of is the role that our people and our team have played,” Agogbua said during a media briefing at the facility in Lagos on Saturday. “Almost every other data centre built here was designed by others for us. Kasi is Nigeria proper. Africa proper.”

The company said the first deployment includes a 5.5-megawatt data hall and a 7.5-megawatt ecosystem floor designed to accommodate local and international businesses requiring colocation, cloud hosting, storage and networking services.

According to Agogbua, the ecosystem floor is intended to allow customers to lease infrastructure ranging from a single server node to an entire aisle of racks, depending on operational requirements.

“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.

Global Director, Marketing and Sales Operations at Kasi Cloud, Ngozika Agogbua, said the project sits at the intersection of technology, economics and geopolitics at a time Africa is increasingly seeking greater control over its digital future.

“Africa has become one of the fastest-growing digital markets in the world,” she said during a press conference in Lagos on Saturday. Yet when it comes to artificial intelligence, the continent still operates with less than one per cent of global compute capacity, relying almost entirely on infrastructure located outside its borders.”

According to her, the dependence on overseas infrastructure means African businesses continue exporting critical data and economic value whenever they run AI workloads.

“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.”

Agogbua described the Lagos campus as part of what could become a structural shift in Africa’s digital economy, comparing the moment to the expansion of subsea cable systems and mobile telecommunications networks that transformed connectivity across the continent over the past two decades.

“We believe this is less a company launch and more a structural turning point,” she said.

The company argued that large-scale local compute infrastructure is becoming increasingly important as governments, financial institutions, startups and enterprises across Africa accelerate adoption of AI-enabled systems and cloud-based services.

The company said the facility is also being designed to support certain GPU-intensive workloads required for AI computing while providing a carrier-neutral interconnection hub linking telecommunications operators and international submarine cable providers.

Agogbua said the upper floors of the campus are specifically designed for wholesale and hyperscale cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft seeking expansion capacity in 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 disclosed that the campus has a dedicated 132-kilovolt substation capable of scaling deployments to approximately 100 megawatts of IT load, positioning it among the largest planned AI-ready compute facilities in the region.

Agogbua repeatedly emphasised the distinction between total power infrastructure and “critical load”, the electricity directly delivered to computing systems, storage infrastructure and networking equipment.