Dr Faisal Orakzai, chief executive officer of Digifloat LLC, says Nigeria needs a sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) stack—not another data centre—to make better use of existing infrastructure and strengthen data sovereignty.
Orakzai spoke on Wednesday at the ongoing Digital Nigeria International Conference and Exhibition (DNICE) in Abuja.
Speaking on “Beyond the Racks: Turning Nigeria’s Sovereign Cloud into a Sovereign AI Economy,” he said an AI stack would strengthen data ownership and drive the country’s digital economy.
He noted that Nigeria had made significant investments in data centre infrastructure but needed to focus on the software platforms and applications required to make those facilities productive.
According to Orakzai, Nigeria has more than 20 data centres, making it Africa’s second-largest data centre market after South Africa.
However, he said that despite the available infrastructure, more than 90 per cent of Nigeria’s data was still hosted abroad, while annual spending on offshore cloud services was estimated at 850 million dollars.
“We have built the racks, but the workloads have not come on. The question is, why do the workloads stay away?
“When a government agency goes to a local data centre today, mostly what it gets is a virtual machine, an empty rack or an empty container.
“Everything that makes that server useful, including the data platform, AI models, security operations and applications, has to be built by the agency itself or sourced from foreign service providers,” he said.
Orakzai said a functional sovereign cloud required five interconnected layers: hosting infrastructure, data platforms, security operations, AI models and applications.
He said Nigeria had made considerable progress in hosting infrastructure but needed to develop the other four layers to keep data and digital services under local control.
According to him, data sovereignty depends not only on the physical location of servers but also on who controls the software and platforms used to access and process data.
The Digifloat CEO also highlighted the financial implications of relying on foreign cloud services, saying exchange-rate fluctuations had significantly increased the cost of technology contracts.
A sovereign technology platform priced in naira, he said, would help protect government and private-sector technology budgets from foreign-exchange volatility.
Orakzai identified the Central Bank of Nigeria’s directive requiring local hosting of payment data from Jan. 1, 2027, as an opportunity to accelerate the adoption of local digital infrastructure.
He also said Nigeria was expected to attract more than two billion dollars in data centre investments through 2027, adding that sufficient workloads would be needed to ensure returns.
A shared sovereign AI platform, he said, would allow government agencies to access common data, security and AI infrastructure instead of investing in separate systems.
However, he cautioned against trying to develop every technology from scratch. Nigeria, he said, needed a hybrid strategy combining locally developed solutions, imported sovereign systems and licensed software.
Orakzai stressed the need to train Nigerian engineers to operate and maintain the platforms, so the model could be replicated across other data centres.
“Let’s not build another data centre. Nigeria already has data centres. Instead, we need a sovereign AI stack that sits on top of them.
“Let’s fill those facilities with data that works for Nigerians, intelligence built in Nigeria, bills paid in Naira, hosted in Nigeria, and powered in Nigeria. Let’s go beyond the racks,” he said.
