Nigeria is moving to reclaim control over the digital infrastructure powering its Economy, launching a sovereign cloud initiative designed to keep more data, workloads, and revenue inside the country.
The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), which regulates the digital economy, says more than 85 percent of Nigerian workloads now run on public clouds operated abroad. Over 90 percent of enterprise data is hosted offshore, and only 22 percent of the country’s 1,000 most-visited websites are hosted locally — well below the sub-Saharan African average of 34 percent.
A workload refers to the software and data that keep an application, website, bank, or government service running. When those workloads sit on foreign servers, Nigerian companies must pay cloud providers in dollars, a burden that grows heavier each time the naira weakens.
In June, Business Day reported that stakeholders in Nigeria’s digital ecosystem estimate the country loses roughly $850 million annually to foreign digital platforms, domain registrations, and offshore data hosting.
The government’s response is the National Sovereign Cloud Initiative, signed with Galaxy Backbone, the state-owned digital infrastructure provider. The policy does not bar global hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. Instead, it presses them to build and operate more infrastructure within Nigeria’s borders.
The push gained urgency after the March 2024 West African submarine cable outages, when damage to four major undersea cables disrupted internet connectivity across the region. The incident exposed how dependent critical digital services remain on international infrastructure.
If more cloud capacity moves onshore, companies could settle invoices in naira rather than dollars, local data centre operators could capture a larger share of the market, and Nigeria could position itself as a cloud hub for West and Central Africa.
The question that matters most to Startups and enterprises remains unanswered: whether domestic providers can match the pricing, reliability, and scale that global hyperscalers already deliver.
