Nigeria is working to expand data centre capacity from about 50 megawatts of IT load to 200 megawatts over five years — a target the national chairman of the governing party says cannot be met without an energy strategy to match.
Nentawe Yilwatda, national chairman of the All Progressives Congress, set out the figure and the warning in a keynote at the National Digital Economy CEO Dialogue, convened by Knowhow Media International with the APC National Secretariat.
“The question for Nigeria is not whether AI will shape our economy. It will. The question is whether we will shape it, or simply rent it.”
The chain
Yilwatda’s central argument is a dependency sequence:
“There is no artificial intelligence without compute, no compute without data centres, no data centres without power and fibre.”
Power and water systems, he noted, were not historically designed to support data centres at the scale an AI economy requires.
“An AI strategy without an energy strategy is incomplete.”
His proposed solutions: treat digital infrastructure as a priority load in power-sector reforms, and enable embedded generation, renewable power purchase arrangements and reliable gas supply for digital infrastructure clusters.
Priority load status is the substantive ask. It would place data centres above other users in dispatch decisions — a politically consequential position in a country where households and industry already compete for supply.
Against the investment target
The warning lands against the Federal Government’s National Digital Cloud Policy, which seeks $750 million in private investment into cloud and data infrastructure within 24 months, with $250 million targeted in the first year.
Quadrupling IT load from 50MW to 200MW is the physical expression of that money. Whether the grid can carry it is the question Yilwatda is putting.
A party chairman qualifying his own government’s policy
The most notable passage concerns sovereignty, where Yilwatda draws a line against the direction of the cloud policy itself.
That policy prefers certified local providers in public procurement, intended to build domestic capacity and keep critical data onshore. Yilwatda cautioned against taking it further.
“Sovereignty must not become an excuse for protectionism that raises costs and drives away the global partners whose technology and capital we need.”
His alternative formulation is “sovereign control with open participation” — Nigerian data and systems operating under Nigerian law, with local and foreign investors both able to participate provided they build and operate in the country and meet Nigerian standards.
That is a governing party chairman publicly qualifying his own government’s procurement preference, and it suggests the balance between localisation and openness is still being argued inside the administration.
The producer question
The broader test Yilwatda identifies is whether Nigeria builds the infrastructure to become a producer of AI technologies, or remains dependent on foreign computing capacity.
He said the next decade would determine whether Nigeria’s digital infrastructure plans amount to a nation-changing structure, arguing that government must supply predictable policy and infrastructure while private industry provides capital, innovation and execution.
By Folake Balogun, BusinessDay.
