Nigeria needs more reliable power supply and data centre capacity to support the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) data localisation requirement, Ayotunde Coker, chief executive officer of Open Access Data Centres (OADC), has said.
Coker spoke on Thursday at GrowthX by TechEconomy 2026 in Lagos during a panel session titled “Data Localisation, Security & Future of Payments in Nigeria”.
The CBN, on June 15, 2026, directed banks, fintechs, mobile money operators, payment processors and other licensed payment operators to store and manage payment transaction data generated in Nigeria on local servers.
The affected institutions have until January 1, 2027, to comply with the directive.
Coker said the policy could drive investment in Nigeria’s digital infrastructure, but electricity supply would remain a key challenge for the sector.
Lagos Can Become Digital Infrastructure Hub
Coker said Lagos has the opportunity to strengthen its position as a major digital infrastructure hub in Africa as demand for local computing capacity increases.
“Lagos is a digital infrastructure hub in West Africa, and it has a significant opportunity to reinforce that but also to continue building out on this trajectory of being the leading infrastructure hub in Africa,” he said.
He listed Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Egypt and Morocco as major digital infrastructure markets on the continent.
According to him, OADC is building between 24 megawatts and 40 megawatts of data centre capacity to support artificial intelligence workloads.
“We are building out a significant scale of about 24 to 40 megawatts of data centres that will support AI,” he said.
He said internet exchanges, carriers and internet service providers would also be required to support the growth of Nigeria’s digital ecosystem.
“Our designs actually are already AI-ready,” Coker said.
Power Supply Remains Major Constraint
Coker said access to reliable electricity would determine how quickly Nigeria could expand its data centre infrastructure.
He said the country’s gas resources and changes in electricity regulation could support the development of dedicated power systems for data centres.
“We have gas. We are increasingly providing domesticated gas,” he said.
Coker said captive power generation at the scale of megawatts and tens of megawatts could help data centre operators meet the growing electricity requirements of digital and AI workloads.
He also identified permitting, access to gas and the tax environment as areas that would require attention to support investment in the sector.
“We have a significant opportunity to really support that trajectory of buildout that we are doing and make Lagos a significant digital infrastructure hub, not just actually in Africa, but as a global landing point for computers and in support of AI as well,” he said.
Coker said local data centre capacity should not be the main challenge for companies seeking to comply with the CBN directive.
“People ask me, ‘Do you have the data centre capacity?’ I say, of course. If you want to move in, we’ve got space. Just give me a call,” he said.
He said OADC was continuing to expand its capacity to support different digital and AI workloads.
Nigeria’s data centre market has expanded in recent years as financial institutions, technology companies and other businesses increase their use of digital services.
The CBN’s localisation directive is expected to further increase demand for local data centre infrastructure as affected institutions review their existing hosting arrangements.
CBN Deadline Will Not Be Same For Everyone
On whether the January 1, 2027 deadline is achievable, Coker said the timeline would depend on the complexity of each institution’s infrastructure.
“For some companies, what they’re doing and moving out from where they are out here is a matter of relocating their infrastructure, and we have the data centre capacities to support that,” he said.
He said companies with significant investments in international cloud platforms could face more complicated migration processes.
“Some companies might be significantly invested in scale and complexity in international cloud platforms. It’s a much more complicated route and solution for them,” Coker said.
“It’s feasible for some. It may not be feasible for others,” he said.
Coker advised affected organisations to assess their architecture, delivery requirements and risks and provide regulators with a clear assessment of what would be required to achieve compliance.
“Organisations have to look at what their complexity is, understand what architecture they require, understand what the delivery complexities they have, put an authentic assessment of it, outline it, and demonstrate what needs to be done,” he said.
The CBN said the localisation requirement must align with Nigeria’s data protection laws and that it would monitor compliance and impose supervisory sanctions where necessary.
For companies currently dependent on offshore cloud infrastructure, compliance could involve migrating workloads to local data centres, restructuring their architecture or adopting other locally compliant infrastructure arrangements.
