When the CBN issued its data localisation directive penultimate week, most of the conversation that followed focused on compliance cost, what it would cost financial institutions to migrate, what it would cost fintechs to build or lease local infrastructure, and what it would cost the industry to meet a January 2027 deadline that many described as uncomfortably tight.
Dr. Ayotunde Coker, chief executive officer of Open Access Data Centre, wants Nigeria to look at a different number.
“For every megawatt, you do about $10 million in construction investment,” he told ICT editors at an interactive session, recently. “So if you build a 10-megawatt data centre, just under $100 million, you can have up to 50 times that in direct or induced impact on your economy.”
The arithmetic he presented was striking: a single 10-megawatt data centre, on his model, generates up to $5 billion in downstream economic value, through engineering contracts, construction supply chains, security companies upskilled to data centre standards, generator and power infrastructure spending, operating staff employment, and the multiplier effects of high-quality digital services delivered locally.
OADC itself is investing $240 million in a 24-megawatt hyperscale facility in Lekki, a figure that, on Coker’s 50x multiplier model, implies a potential downstream economic impact in the range of $12 billion when fully operational and matured.
The construction and operation of data centres, Coker argued, is one of the most effective forms of industrial capacity-building that Nigeria can pursue.
“We’ve created a supply chain in Nigeria for data centre build capability that didn’t exist ten years ago. The M&E companies, the generator companies, the security companies, the architects who now understand the kind of architectural requirements for data centres, international companies like Vertiv and Schneider Electric are growing their local capabilities here.”
The FX dimension of the directive added another layer to the economic case. For institutions that currently rely on offshore cloud infrastructure, compliance costs include ongoing foreign currency expenditure, dollar-denominated cloud hosting fees that fluctuate with exchange rate movements. Localisation converts a significant portion of that cost from a dollar obligation to a naira one, reducing currency exposure at scale across the financial services sector.
“If your market is in naira and your costs, in a way, are in naira, even though in the cycle of transactions you have some dollar exposure, at least it’s not that immediate impact where you’re going to have to find foreign currency on the day your invoice is due,” Coker said.
But the economic opportunity Coker described extended well beyond financial services, and well beyond the CBN’s current directive.
The sectors queuing behind the banks
When asked which industries would be next to face data localisation requirements, Coker identified three with particular conviction.
Oil and gas emerged as his primary candidate.
“The oil and gas sector is going through a significant, fantastic transformation that needs to be enabled through technology,” he said. “Any agile business that thinks they’ll build their own data centre has already lost their agility, by the time you put your capital into building a data centre, you should be building wells, expanding your gas facilities. You’ve lost the race.”
He predicted that data sovereignty requirements for oil and gas exploration data, much of which is currently held offshore, were a foreseeable policy direction.
Manufacturing and pharmaceuticals represented a second wave.
“The ERP systems that companies in manufacturing, pharma, and FMCG are using are hosted in Germany or the Netherlands, and they’re all complaining about latency. The key ERP companies that establish locally will see a whole wave of migration for practical reasons.”
State governments represented a third.
“As states look to expand their citizen and government services, you’ll see more shifts. But I always say to states, no point building a data centre. Go build a school, build a road, build a hospital. Partner with people who know how to do data centres. Automate government, bring in e-government.”
The economic model he described, government as anchor tenant for edge data centres rather than builder of them, mirrors infrastructure development patterns already emerging in South Africa, where OADC operates more than 40 data centres and 32 edge data centres.
The signal to global hyperscalers
One of Coker’s most pointed observations concerned the secondary effect of Nigeria’s localisation directive on global cloud providers.
“It sends a signal to the world that data sovereignty and localisation is key, in legislated form. It’ll trigger the global providers to bring their own scale of cloud here, which is good for building our digital infrastructure scale,” he said.
That signal appears to be landing: Nigeria’s data centre market is projected to grow from $322.65 million in 2025 to $782.82 million by 2031, at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 16 per cent, driven in part by accelerating regulatory data-residency mandates.
Coker said the directive had already generated a measurable shift in OADC’s own inquiry volume.
“We’re now starting to actually see some of the inquiries around how this might happen with our data centres,” he confirmed, an early signal that compliance planning, however tentative, has begun among at least some affected institutions.
The broader case he made, however, was not narrowly about OADC’s pipeline. It was about a country at the threshold of a digital infrastructure build-out that, if executed deliberately, could anchor economic value at a scale the CBN directive itself does not fully articulate.
“The reason I give that example,” he said of the 50x multiplier, “is that these are some of the direct consequences. You start to operate, you have operating engineers, you have people to support and maintain your generators, you’re connecting to power companies that now know they need to scale up to deliver megawatts. And being able to deliver high-quality digital services locally, at its own value, is what this is all about.”
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