Noting this in an interview with Techeconomy, Dr Krishnan said, “Data domestication is a legal requirement of any continent. The data must remain within the sovereign borders of the country. Which is a must, which is a mandate, and which we are pushing through the ministry as well as NITDA, and the Data Protection Commission,” he said.

“This is happening as of now, and it’s a process, so over a period of time, we will get it 100% right.”

Africa Data Centres, a subsidiary of Cassava Technologies, operates one of the largest network-neutral data centre platforms on the continent. And as Nigeria tightens its data localisation policies, the company is helping to build the country’s long-term digital sovereignty infrastructure, ensuring that sensitive workloads stay local, not on foreign servers.

But building a data economy that can handle that responsibility isn’t simple. Beyond compliance, the stakes are national, data is becoming a new form of sovereignty, determining a country’s digital independence.

When asked about the growing wave of AI, Dr Krishnan Ranganath pointed to both progress and challenges. “AI workloads are beginning to increase as of now. And of course, the networks need to fall in place. We have a lot of issues on the networks and connectivity side that is falling in place bit by bit,” he said.

“Once some of the ongoing projects fall in place, that latency part will reduce. Because Nigeria is not just Lagos alone. It goes out to other parts of Nigeria, which is, you know, a home for 180 million remaining Nigerians.”

He pointed out that AI won’t scale if the rest of the country remains poorly connected. For years, Lagos has carried the digital load, but expanding reliable connectivity and infrastructure across other regions is now essential if Nigeria wants to compete in the AI phase.

AI adoption, in particular, depends on strong, distributed infrastructure, something data centres like Africa Data Centres are striving to build across the region.

Still, even the most advanced data centres can’t operate without steady electricity, and that’s where Nigeria continues to find it tough. Unreliable electricity continues to drag on the growth of digital services.

On this, Dr Krishnan Ranganath said, “Power always remains an issue in Nigeria, especially the transmission is the biggest issue for power. Otherwise, you know, we have decent enough power generation in Nigeria.”

He believes collaboration between data centres, operators, and independent power producers (IPPs) is the key to keeping servers online. “Collaboration between various data centres and operators along with IPPs is the way forward, which I see,” he explained.

“Of course, we talk about a lot of atomic power and other related stuff, but we are not ready for that as of now, to my understanding, because the government needs to put frameworks for that. But to start with, better collaboration between the data centres, operators, and IPPs, that takes us a long way.”

That kind of realisation, balancing vision with practical limitations, defines Africa Data Centres’ approach. The company is part of a pan-African drive to build the backbone of the continent’s digital economy. 

In Nigeria, this means laying the foundation for a phase where data sovereignty, AI innovation, and energy sustainability converge.

Companies like Africa Data Centres are taking a chance that these gaps can be bridged with consistent investment, strategic partnerships and patient execution..

At GITEX NIGERIA 2025, global players talked about scaling AI and cloud adoption across Africa, but Dr Krishnan’s perspective was grounded in the realities on the ground: local data, stable power, and connected networks. Without these, the continent’s AI vision might still be waiting for the lights to stay on.

If you want to know how Nigeria is doing when it comes to digital growth, you’d need to first note that 14.19% of our GDP already comes from the digital economy. That’s more than oil on some days. 

But then, most citizens still queue for hours to register SIM cards, verify NINs, or collect a paper file stamped three times before it counts as “official.” We are a digital economy on paper and a paper economy in practice.

By early 2026, the government says this gap will close with the rollout of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), a framework that will integrate identity, payments, and data exchange across ministries and states.

Yes, Nigeria can build a DPI, but how will it change the country’s economic dynamics, business opportunities, and what are the risks? Will it create efficiency, attract investment, and bring about innovation? Are we strong enough to handle the risks? Will it expose citizens to new dangers, from cyberattacks to privacy violations and deeper exclusion for those left offline?

What DPI Actually Means

The DPI framework isn’t one app or a single government portal. It is a collection of interconnected systems designed to make the state, businesses, and citizens operate on the same digital rails. At its core, Nigeria’s DPI will include:

• A National Data Exchange System (NGDX).
• Interoperable platforms for digital identity, payments, and service delivery.
• State-level models that mirror the national framework, so states can align but still run their own processes.

If executed well, this means less duplication, more transparency, and fewer wasted hours in government offices. For the private sector, it means one set of rails to plug into instead of navigating multiple silos.

Economic Stakes

Nigeria’s digital economy already contributes 14.19% of GDP as of mid-2025, with a 21% projection by 2027. Policymakers expect DPI to boost this contribution. How?

• Efficiency improvements: Ministries, departments, and agencies will coordinate data in real time, cutting costs and curbing leakages.
• Formalising the informal: With digital IDs and interoperable payments, millions of small businesses can be brought into the tax net and credit system.
• Innovation boost: Startups will gain access to unified systems that allow them to scale products faster.

India’s experience with Aadhaar and UPI shows how DPI can boost an economy. But India had consistent investment and strong political commitment. Nigeria’s path is less predictable.

Business Opportunities

For businesses, DPI could be the great leveller.

• Fintechs can integrate directly into government payment systems.
• Healthtech and edtech firms can design services around verified digital IDs.
• Telcos and infrastructure providers will supply the fibre, data centres, and cloud hosting that make it possible.
• Even NIPOST, long dismissed as irrelevant, is reinventing itself with digital smart lockers, postcodes, and financial services at post offices nationwide.

If trust is built and adoption is wide, DPI could attract more foreign direct investment. Investors like predictability and scale; DPI promises both.

The Risks We Cannot Ignore

This is where positivity collides with Nigeria’s reality. Here are the risks:

1. Cybersecurity and Privacy
   The Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) has already stressed that without strong governance, trust will collapse. DPI means more centralised data, and that means one successful breach could cripple confidence for years.
2. Exclusion
   Satellite infrastructure, the “7-7 Project”, is being deployed to connect all 774 local government headquarters. It is commendable. But rural communities face bigger challenges, which include device affordability, literacy, and digital skills. Inclusion cannot stop at connectivity.
3. Fragmentation
   Nigeria is famous for parallel systems. If ministries and states build their own versions without strict interoperability, the framework could become another patchwork of silos.
4. Implementation gaps
   We know the story. NIN enrolment delays, BVN mismatches, and power shortages. Technology can be ready by 2025, but systems usually collapse at the human bottleneck, corruption, bureaucracy, and weak enforcement.

Inclusion and Trust

DPI is a governance test, let’s not limit it to a technology project. Who owns the data, the citizen, the government, or the vendor building the platform? Will the average Nigerian trust a government system enough to adopt it?

Countries that succeeded in building DPI didn’t just roll out platforms. They created rules of the game and gave citizens confidence in the system. In Nigeria, the NDPC is young, underfunded, and untested. Without strong oversight, the infrastructure risks being weaponised for surveillance rather than service delivery.

Questions We Must Ask

• Can Nigeria avoid turning DPI into another white-elephant project?
• Will privacy and security be designed into the system, or treated as an afterthought?
• Can this framework bridge the rural-urban divide, or will it widen it?
• Is the ambition of a $1 trillion economy realistic without fixing trust and governance?

If Nigeria gets DPI right, the impact will be historic. A farmer in Sokoto could access subsidies in real time, a student in Yaba could enrol in university without stepping into an office, and businesses could scale services without running into fragmented systems.

But if Nigeria gets it wrong, DPI risks becoming another expensive layer of bureaucracy, digital in name, analogue practically. The infrastructure may be digital, but the real infrastructure is trust. Without it, 2026 will just be another missed deadline dressed up as progress.

However, in the midst of this booming digital tide, the country’s tech sector is still challenged with infrastructure gaps and the perennial search for investment, an irony not lost on participants at the inaugural GITEX NIGERIA.

Held from September 1 to 4, 2025 across Abuja and Lagos, GITEX NIGERIA brought together global tech giants, startups, and investors from 78 countries under the patronage of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. 

Organised by KAOUN International and backed by the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy and NITDA, the event was pitched as a platform for Nigeria to assert itself as Africa’s digital hub.

“In three short days, GITEX NIGERIA has already had a meaningful impact on our nation, from startups seeking funds and exposure with global investors to international organisations discovering the vast growth opportunities within our digital economy,” Olatunbosun Alake, commissioner for Innovation, Science & Technology, Lagos State, stated.

“This annual event will continue to grow, have a long-term contribution to Nigerian digitalisation, and show the world the power of international collaboration.”

Abdelaziz Saidu, country leader at Cisco Nigeria & Ghana, said “The crowd has been overwhelming, not just in size but in the quality of people coming to our stand, including the Lagos State Governor and the Minister, who were impressed with our AI and cyber security showcases.”

“From day one we’ve generated strong leads, some already converting into opportunities, and engaged with organisations like the African Union. The brand reputation of GITEX has pulled in the right crowd locally, regionally and internationally, making this inaugural edition truly impactful.”

The event ran on dual platforms, the Tech Expo & Future Economy Conference at the Eko Hotel Convention Centre, and the Startup Festival at the Landmark Centre. These hubs provided startups, investors, and corporates a chance to forge partnerships, explore Nigeria’s digital market, and pitch ideas to decision-makers. 

International tech giants such as IBM, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AWS, and Kaspersky showcased innovations ranging from AI solutions to cybersecurity frameworks, emphasising the strategic relevance of the Nigerian market.

The surge of Nigeria’s digital economy has been largely powered by the Information & Communications sector, contributing 10.59% of GDP, and the Finance Institutions sector, adding 3.60%. With projections indicating the ICT sector could account for up to 21% of GDP by 2027, Nigeria’s goal to become Africa’s leading digital hub is a roadmap, not just a talking point.

GITEX NIGERIA provided more visibility for West Africa. Its investor programme facilitated cross-border collaborations, bringing in deals and partnerships that could boost Nigeria’s digital growth.

For a country where digital access still battles infrastructural bottlenecks, the event stressed both the promise and the challenge: Nigeria is ready to lead, but the path is complex and demands sustained investment and governance support.

Instead of eroding safety, 84% of these businesses report stronger privacy initiatives since integrating AI into their operations.

The findings, titled The AI Privacy Equation: The Nigerian Model of Responsible AI Adoption and unveiled at Zoholics Nigeria, revealed Nigeria as a global reference point for AI adoption balanced with privacy. 

Beyond AI adoption and privacy focus, the event also celebrated another milestone for Zoho, which announced a 75% customer growth in Nigeria in 2024, one of its fastest-growing markets worldwide.

“We continue to invest in Nigeria as businesses here accelerate their adoption of technology to grow and scale,” said Kehinde Ogundare, country head, Zoho Nigeria. 

“The latest study around AI and Privacy proves that Nigerian businesses are leading the way in responsible AI adoption, as they temper the new technology with privacy measures. This mirrors Zoho’s philosophy of building contextual and privacy-first AI models that can help businesses realise tangible benefits. We infuse our AI solutions—from conversational and prescriptive to agentic and generative—with business context so that it can provide organisations with decision intelligence.”

Balancing AI With Privacy

The study, which surveyed 386 Nigerian business leaders, shows how companies are embedding AI responsibly. Ninety-four percent now have a dedicated privacy officer or team, a figure well above global averages. 

Nearly 40% allocate over 30% of their IT budgets to privacy protection, opining that governance is not a constraint but a competitive advantage.

Michael Fauscette, CEO and chief analyst of Arion Research, underscored this shift:

“The Nigerian model challenges the conventional wisdom that AI adoption requires privacy trade-offs. When 84% of organisations strengthen their privacy measures through AI implementation rather than weakening them, it demonstrates that privacy-conscious design can actually enhance AI outcomes. Nigerian businesses are proving that robust governance isn’t a constraint on innovation, it’s a competitive advantage.”

Leadership and Deployment

More than half of survey respondents were CEOs or senior executives, showing that AI adoption is being driven from the top. Unlike other markets where implementation lags, Nigeria is moving quickly from pilots to enterprise-wide rollouts. 

Thirty-one percent of businesses reported advanced integration across the organisation, while another 26.5% are deploying AI across multiple departments.

The financial services sector, which accounted for 29% of respondents, is leading the charge. Customer service automation (49%), software development (46%), and marketing optimisation (32%) are the top use cases, all designed with privacy-by-design principles.

Skills, Barriers and Regulation

On challenges, despite rapid adoption, thirty-seven percent of companies revealed a lack of technical expertise as their biggest challenge, followed closely by privacy and security issues (35%). 

To close this gap, 69% of businesses are prioritising data analysis and interpretation, 53% are focusing on AI literacy, and 40% are investing in prompt engineering for generative AI.

Regulation is also impacting behaviour. Nearly 65% of organisations say awareness has increased since Nigeria’s Data Protection Act was introduced. Many conduct regular privacy audits (57%), minimise data used in AI training (57%), and require explainability of AI decisions (52%).

Why it Matters to Zoho

For Zoho, these findings on AI adoption and privacy, align directly with its positioning. The company has consistently rejected data monetisation in favour of privacy-first design, a stance that resonates with Nigerian businesses now investing heavily in privacy-conscious AI.

Zoho’s growth in Nigeria is being driven by demand for scalable, unified solutions. Its top-performing products in the country include Zoho Workplace (enterprise email and collaboration), Zoho Books (accounting software), Zoho Campaigns (marketing automation), and Zoho One (a suite of 55+ integrated business applications). 

Key customer sectors include IT services, financial services, energy, manufacturing, real estate, media, education, and retail.

In tying AI adoption to privacy protection, Nigerian businesses are gaining global competitive advantage, and for Zoho, this validates its belief in Nigeria, both as a high-growth market and as a model for how technology and trust can advance together.

And for businesses, this gap means higher expenses, slower access to cloud services and limited ability to scale competitively.

Today, Open Access Data Centres (OADC), a WIOCC Group company, launched Open Access Fabric (OAfabric) in Nigeria (OADC Lagos) and the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC (OADC Texaf – Kinshasa), to leapfrog these limitations and position Nigeria as Africa’s digital nerve centre.

With over 107 million internet users, Nigeria represents the continent’s largest digital market, but enterprises have long had challenges with high latency, expensive transit, and inconsistent local content access. 

The game-changing interconnection platform, OAfabric directly addresses these challenges, providing secure, low-latency connections, direct peering with global cloud providers, and integration with leading African IXPs, including IXPN in Nigeria and KINIX in the DRC.

Speaking at the launch, Dr Ayotunde Coker, chief executive officer of OADC, said “We designed OAfabric around the real challenges African businesses face. It is about solving problems – reducing the cost to compute, improving performance, unlocking access to cloud and content, and creating an environment where companies can scale with confidence while accelerating time to market.”

OAfabric is engineered to scale from 1Gbps to 100Gbps, supporting hybrid colocation architectures, AI workloads, and data-intensive applications. Traditionally, enterprises had to rely on the open internet, risking security breaches and inconsistent performance. Coker highlighted the platform’s protective advantage:

“Without OAfabric, if you want to go to the cloud, you basically have to go to the open internet. All of us understand the disadvantages of pushing your content into the open internet. Companies now have to start building layers of security, all the years of security. 

“But with OAfabric, it is a secured connection, structural cable connection from here all the way into the cloud environment, irrespective of where you are. So you are guaranteed that literally, for someone to hack, he has to use a source and come back in. It’s extremely secure connectivity.”

Resilient, Reliable, and Rapid

The platform’s resilience was demonstrated last year during a subsea cable disruption. OADC restored 2 terabytes of connectivity within 48 hours, a project that would normally take three months, stressing the network’s ability to maintain Africa’s digital backbone under extreme pressure.

Latency is dramatically reduced, a huge factor for enterprises in fintech, cloud services, and AI. Coker explained:

“We deliver a significant, well-reliable, low-latency connection. Latency between here and points in Europe, for instance, is significantly reduced. You can interconnect into Amsterdam, the UK, Marseille. We define with cloud providers exactly where we want to meet them and cross-connect very neatly, and it has a significant result on latency.”

Since 2018, OADC has expanded strategically across the continent. The Lagos data centre in Lekki currently operates at 2 megawatts, with plans to scale to 24 megawatts. 

Facilities in Kinshasa and four South African cities—Durban, Johannesburg, and Cape Town—serve as interconnection points for global subsea cables including Google Aquiano and 2Africa, creating a robust pan-African network.

Coker elaborated that “OAfabric gives us a more efficient way of delivering growth, not just in one direction, but with the capability to reverse the direction as we have more internet exchanges here, localising data. As we bring more actual cloud on-ramps into the country, we build the infrastructure for those hyperscale ramps to come here, and that’s what we’re doing.”

OAfabric aligns with Nigeria’s mega cloud policy, ensuring sensitive data remains within national borders while empowering local cloud providers to compete with international hyperscalers. It also opens the Nigerian market to foreign investment, enabling cloud edge zones and disaster recovery zones to be deployed with speed and confidence.

Head of Converged Open and Digital Infrastructure, OADC Africa, Obinna Adumike, explained the reach of OAfabric beyond Nigeria and DRC:

“OAfabric is big, and it’s here. We have a very robust connectivity network, and the biggest advantage of that is the fact that WIOCC network can connect you to any country in the world, but most especially the closest continents that Africa impacts on; Africa, Europe, America, and then within the continent, East Africa, Southern Africa and all of that. These are the regions that most of our cloud users either connect to, send, or collect traffic.”

Simplifying Complexity for Enterprises

For businesses, OAfabric transforms previously complex digital operations into seamless, manageable workflows. Coker expatiated this:

“Think of OAfabric as a box in a data centre. You connect to it, choose your pipe size—like deciding between a two-lane or four-lane highway—and your data flows efficiently to the cloud. The faster and more reliable the connection, the better the user experience.”

“OAfabric is not just infrastructure; it represents a shift in what is possible for Africa’s digital economy,” added Dr Coker. “By removing barriers and enabling seamless, high-performance peering between key ecosystems, including local and global Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), content providers, cloud platforms and enterprises, it provides the frictionless interconnection needed to access digital services more efficiently.”

With OAfabric live in Nigeria and the DRC, OADC is creating a resilient, secure, and scalable pan-African digital ecosystem, empowering enterprises, accelerating innovation, and defining a new era of African digital sovereignty.

This comes under the “Nigeria First” policy, which seeks to strengthen local capacity and ensure that government data remains within the country.

In a circular issued by the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (OSGF), MDAs were reminded to channel their technology needs through GBB, ranging from IP-network services to data centre hosting and digital infrastructure solutions. 

The decision is tied to the government’s heavy investment in the National Information Communications Technology Infrastructure Backbone (NICTIB), which remains the core of Nigeria’s e-government platform.

GBB’s mandate goes beyond connectivity. It has now been designated as the government’s official data exchange platform and the interoperability layer for Nigeria’s digital public infrastructure. This places the agency at the centre of efforts to coordinate and integrate federal digital services while maintaining the country’s data sovereignty goals.

Professor Ibrahim Adeyanju, managing director and chief executive of GBB, said the organisation had restructured its operations to better serve public institutions. “We have repositioned our organisation in such a way that the MDAs experience the quality, reliability, and innovation of our services and they can see us as a partner in their digital transformation journey,” he stated.

Adeyanju stressed the importance of collaboration with MDAs, adding: “Our pledge is to listen, collaborate, and provide tailored digital infrastructure solutions that meet the unique needs of each agency, while ensuring Nigeria’s data remains safe within our borders.”

The government is also encouraging agencies still hosting data abroad to migrate to GBB’s platforms. Officials believe this will not only improve service delivery but also enhance cybersecurity and align with global best practices.

Backed by multiple ISO certifications, GBB insists its operations are rooted in security, service excellence and innovation.

With the renewed directive, it is expected that the agency’s work with MDAs will speed up Nigeria’s digital transformation drive and directly contribute to the country’s economic growth.