MTN Nigeria officially inaugurated the first phase of its Dabengwa Sifiso Data Centre, a $235 million investment in Lagos, alongside launching a new cloud service designed to compete with global giants like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Phase 1 of the Dabengwa Sifiso Data Centre, named in honor of a former MTN CEO, is a Tier III facility featuring 780 racks and an IT load capacity of 4.5MW. The company invested approximately $150 million in this phase, with an additional $20 million dedicated to cloud infrastructure development.
The data centre’s cloud service offers self-orchestration capabilities, enabling developers to independently manage their computing and storage requirements through an online platform. According to Lynda Saint-Nwafor, MTN Nigeria’s Chief Enterprise Business Officer, this locally hosted cloud infrastructure delivers lower latency, faster data access, and pricing in Nigerian naira—an advantage over Amazon Web Services, which accepts payments in naira but prices services in foreign currency.
MTN plans a second phase of the data centre to meet Tier IV standards, potentially increasing capacity to 14MW or more depending on demand, although no timeline has been provided for completion.
MTN Nigeria claims that the Dabengwa Sifiso Data Centre is currently the largest in West Africa. However, competitors such as Open Access Data Centres (OADC), a subsidiary of WIOCC Group, are planning expansions to reach 24MW capacity in Lagos by 2027.
