Nigeria’s data centre capacity is currently just 20 per cent of South Africa’s, a stark deficit that infrastructure experts warn could hamper the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) upcoming data localisation mandate.
Speaking at a Lagos forum marking the 30th anniversary of Signal Alliance Technology Holding (SATH), Chairman Collins Onuegbu urged massive, immediate investment in local data infrastructure. His warning comes ahead of the CBN’s deadline ordering financial institutions to localise all payment-related data. Onuegbu commended the directive, noting that data sovereignty has become the “new real estate,” but warned that policy without capacity is unsustainable, especially as the global artificial intelligence boom demands unprecedented data storage.
“It’s good to shout AI, AI, AI, but AI today is driven by data centre capacity,” Onuegbu said, adding that resolving Nigeria’s chronic power shortage is the first step toward fixing its data deficits.
While tier-one traditional banks largely house critical regulatory data on-premises or through compliant local hubs, the CBN policy presents a severe hurdle for agile tech startups.
Kenneth Ufomba, Managing Director of SATH Technology Consulting, explained that the policy heavily impacts “cloud-born” fintechs. These younger companies move fast and rely entirely on foreign infrastructure like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure, lacking the massive capital required to build or lease tier-four local data centres.
To prevent compliance failures, SATH has begun rolling out technical audits and migration roadmaps for affected financial institutions. Busola Komolafe, Managing Director of SATH Cloud, revealed that the firm has developed specific diagnostic frameworks to help fintechs isolate regulated transaction records, pull them from international servers, and route them back into secure local storage.
To align with these shifting regulatory realities and the continent’s broader digital transformation, the tech conglomerate announced a major structural rebranding of its subsidiaries:
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CloudSA has transitioned to SATH Cloud, focusing on localised cloud infrastructure, migration, and digital security.
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Signal Alliance Consulting has been renamed SATH Technology Consulting, shifting its focus toward enterprise architecture and regulatory compliance advisory.
Group executives noted that the corporate restructuring represents a long-term commitment to solving local infrastructure bottlenecks, ensuring that Nigerian businesses can safely keep their data within national borders while scaling efficiently.
