Airtel Nigeria has announced a significant investment to establish a state-of-the-art data centre, responding to the rising demand for data and connectivity.
During a recent media event, Dinesh Balsingh, the CEO of Airtel Nigeria, and Ogo Ofomata, the Airtel business director, revealed details about the upcoming hyperscale facility. It will be situated in Lagos and is scheduled to have an initial IT load capacity of 38 megawatts.
“We aim to set a high standard from the outset. We plan to build at the hyperscale level to meet the demands of modern infrastructure,” stated Ofomata.
This announcement follows closely on the heels of a similar declaration by MTN, Nigeria’s largest telecommunications provider. MTN has plans to invest US$240 million in a data centre in Ikeja, Lagos, named after the late MTN Group CEO Sifiso Dabengwa. This facility is anticipated to be Nigeria’s largest pre-fabricated modular data centre, featuring 96 containerised modules and 1,500 racks, with power and cooling systems designed for maximum efficiency spread across three floors.
Balsingh emphasised that Airtel’s data centre is designed to accommodate GPU servers, which demand significantly more power and cooling than traditional CPU-based systems. “GPU servers are ten times larger than CPU servers and can deliver performance that is a hundred times greater,” he remarked, highlighting the facility’s focus on supporting artificial intelligence applications.
