Nigeria has unveiled a National Digital Cloud Policy aimed at attracting $750 million in private investment within 24 months, covering data centres, cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence computing capacity, while setting new rules for government cloud adoption and the protection of sensitive public data.
Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy Minister Bosun Tijani said the policy is designed to make Nigeria a location for infrastructure, investment, skills and digital service exports rather than solely a consumer of foreign cloud services.
Sovereignty provisions will apply to defined categories of government and regulated data considered to require national control — a narrower approach than blanket localisation, which allows commercial workloads to sit wherever makes commercial sense while ring-fencing what the state deems sensitive.
Splitting the institutions
The most consequential design choice is structural. Responsibilities have been separated across three bodies: one for regulatory oversight, standards and assurance; another for operational delivery, shared infrastructure and aggregation; and a third for compliance with public procurement rules. A committee chaired by the minister will oversee the sovereignty framework.
That separation addresses a familiar failure mode in which a single agency writes the rules, delivers the service and audits itself. Whether it works depends on which institutions fill the roles — none of which the announcement names.
The policy also proposes pooling government departments’ demand for cloud services from registered providers, and establishing a National Digital Marketplace for coordinated procurement of cloud and digital infrastructure services. Aggregating demand across ministries is a straightforward lever for reducing unit costs, and one Roger Jantio argued in these pages is among the few tools governments hold for creating early demand that local technology companies can actually win.
Three phases
Implementation runs over 24 months. The first phase covers policy activation, baseline assessments, institutional arrangements and investment facilitation. The second launches the National Digital Marketplace, begins migrating priority ministries, departments and agencies, and onboards registered providers. The third scales government migration, expands infrastructure, brings in participating states, strengthens regional interconnection and grows digital service exports.
Performance targets are said to cover capacity, export earnings, cost savings and skills development, though specific figures were not published.
Where the $750 million would land
The target is being set against a market that has already begun moving. Kasi Cloud commissioned its Lekki campus in Lagos in July — designed to scale to roughly 100MW and explicitly aligned to Nigeria’s cloud policy requirement for in-country hosting of sensitive government and financial data, with the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority among its foundational investors. MTN confirmed in March that it will build an AI-enabled data centre in Nigeria alongside one in South Africa. OADC announced a partnership this week to host AI compute for regulated African enterprises.
The outflow the policy is trying to reverse is quantified. Nigerian enterprises spend an estimated $850 million annually on foreign cloud hosting, according to figures cited at the Kasi launch — more than the entire investment target the policy sets.
Nigeria, Egypt and Kenya have each published draft AI policies since January 2025 identifying dependence on US technology companies as a threat to security and sovereignty. As Rachel Adams of the Global Center on AI Governance put it in reporting iAfrica covered in May, digital sovereignty “cannot mean total independence from global AI supply chains” but can mean stronger control over sensitive data, better procurement rules, and clearer accountability for foreign providers. The Nigerian policy’s category-based approach to sovereignty is an attempt to draw that line.
The constraint the policy doesn’t solve
The policy complements Project BRIDGE, the 90,000-kilometre fibre rollout, and the 3 Million Technical Talent programme.
What none of them addresses directly is power. The IMF, Oxford Insights and Nigeria’s own assessments have all identified unreliable electricity as the binding constraint on data-centre capacity — and the African Energy Chamber has argued Nigeria’s gas reserves could supply the baseload that hyperscale AI facilities require, if the investment framework existed to connect them.
A policy can pool demand, separate institutions and define sovereign data categories. Whether $750 million arrives depends on whether investors believe the electricity will.
