By Mariam Abeeb
The Federal Government has unveiled plans to transform Nigeria from a major consumer of offshore digital services into a leading cloud computing and digital infrastructure hub in West Africa, leveraging its large domestic market to attract global technology giants and local infrastructure developers.
The Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, disclosed this while speaking at a workshop on “Nigeria’s Digital Infrastructure Opportunity” during ITW Data Cloud Africa 2026.
He said the government was working to provide regulatory certainty, create structured demand and establish a sovereign cloud ecosystem capable of serving Nigeria’s more than 230 million citizens and the wider African market.
According to Inuwa, Nigeria currently faces a significant gap between its huge demand for computing capacity and the availability of domestic infrastructure, with local data capacity operating at nearly 90 per cent utilisation.
He said the situation had resulted in substantial digital value and computing demand being routed through foreign servers, creating an opportunity for investors to build and expand local infrastructure.
To address the gap, the NITDA DG said the government was deploying its purchasing power through a newly institutionalised “Cloud-First Policy,” which seeks to consolidate public-sector technology spending and position government as an anchor customer for cloud and shared digital infrastructure providers.
He revealed 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.
Inuwa said government technology demand alone generates nearly $1 billion annually, adding that the government intends to channel this spending towards cloud infrastructure and shared architecture rather than fragmented investments in individual public data centres.
He explained that the approach was designed to create predictable demand and encourage greater private-sector participation and innovation.
He said NITDA was also working to improve the regulatory environment by replacing fragmented and unpredictable oversight with a more unified approach aimed at boosting investor confidence.
According to him, the agency is establishing a single-interface portal to streamline compliance requirements across government institutions, while horizontal standards would enable regulators across different sectors to adopt common baseline requirements.
The initiative, he explained, would particularly benefit highly regulated sectors such as financial services by allowing institutions to migrate core data to local cloud platforms without having to navigate repetitive regulatory approval processes.
He stressed that the regulatory framework was intended primarily to create a competitive market rather than generate revenue, with emphasis on international interoperability and healthy competition instead of rigid data localisation requirements.
The NITDA chief also highlighted Nigeria’s growing digital market, noting that broadband penetration had risen to more than 56 per cent, supported by about 192 million mobile subscribers and 157 million internet users.
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