..woos investors with $750m digital cloud plan
The Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, has outlined an ambitious plan to provide regulatory certainty, create structured demand and build a sovereign cloud ecosystem capable of serving more than 230 million Nigerians and the wider region.
Abdullahi spoke while presenting a paper titled “Nigeria’s Digital Infrastructure Opportunity” at a workshop during ITW Data Cloud Africa 2026.
He said the strategy was designed to address a major economic gap, noting that despite Nigeria’s huge domestic demand, much of its computing and digital value was currently being routed through foreign servers.
According to him, local data capacity is already operating at nearly 90 per cent utilisation, forcing the country to rely heavily on offshore resources.
To bridge the gap, the Federal Government is leveraging its purchasing power through a newly institutionalised “Cloud-First Policy”, which seeks to consolidate fragmented public-sector IT spending and position government as an anchor customer for cloud infrastructure developers.
Abdullahi disclosed that between 2023 and mid-2026, 326 federal ministries, departments and agencies spent N3.89 trillion, equivalent to about $2.9 billion, on technology investments.
He said government demand alone generates nearly $1 billion annually, adding that the funds would increasingly be directed towards cloud infrastructure and shared digital architecture rather than isolated public data centres.
“To ensure investor confidence, NITDA is replacing fragmented and unpredictable oversight with a unified regulatory approach,” the NITDA DG said.
He disclosed that the agency was establishing a single-interface portal to streamline compliance across multiple government bodies, while cross-agency alignment would enable sector regulators, including the Central Bank of Nigeria, to adopt shared baseline requirements.
Abdullahi said the framework would allow financial institutions to migrate core data to local cloud systems without navigating multiple and overlapping regulatory approvals.
He stressed that the initiative was aimed at market creation rather than revenue generation, with emphasis on healthy competition and international interoperability rather than rigid data localisation requirements.
The NITDA DG said the economic fundamentals behind the initiative were strong, noting that broadband penetration had risen by nearly 10 percentage points to more than 56 per cent, supported by 192 million mobile subscribers and 157 million internet users.
He added that research estimates every dollar invested in Nigeria’s digital infrastructure generates about $8 in broader economic returns, while the domestic cloud market is projected to grow from $376 million in 2026 to more than $783 million by 2031.
Beyond Nigeria, Abdullahi said the government’s ambition extended across West and Central Africa, leveraging the country’s geographical position as a major transit hub for neighbouring landlocked countries.
He said the National Digital Cloud Policy targets $750 million in total digital infrastructure investments within two years, beginning with $250 million in private capital during the first year.
According to him, harmonising digital standards with partner countries would also facilitate cross-border data transfer frameworks, enabling African nations to exercise greater control over how their data is secured, hosted and scaled within the continent.
