Nigeria’s data-centre market, worth roughly $288 million in 2025, could pass $1 billion by 2031 as operators race to add capacity in Lagos and other hubs, according to the African Energy Chamber. The industry group argues the boom rests on a constraint the country has never fully solved: reliable power.

A demographics bet

Nigeria is already home to more than 240 million people, and the United Nations projects it could pass 400 million by 2050, making it the world’s third most populous country after India and China. With a median age of around 18 and internet penetration above 50%, a young, mobile-first population is entering the digital economy each year.

That trajectory is reshaping the long-term case for cloud computing, AI services, fintech, streaming and sovereign data storage. Operators, including Equinix, MTN, Rack Centre, and Open Access Data Centres, are scaling colocation and cloud capacity, and in 2025, MTN announced a more than $240 million investment in a new Lagos facility built for AI and cloud demand. The chamber estimates that broader data-centre investment in Nigeria is at close to $1 billion.

Power is the catch

AI workloads run at far higher rack densities than traditional cloud services, drawing much more electricity. Nigeria’s grid remains unreliable, and operators lean heavily on backup generation and hybrid power systems to keep facilities running.

“Data centres are becoming critical infrastructure for Africa’s economic future, but none of this growth happens without energy,” said NJ Ayuk, executive chairman of the African Energy Chamber. “Countries like Nigeria are seeing rising demand because of demographics, connectivity and digital adoption, but investors also need confidence that long-term power supply can support that expansion.”

Could gas be the bridge?

Globally, the AI race has become an energy race. Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Oracle are signing long-term power agreements and financing generation to feed hyperscale data centres. The chamber points to US deals as a template: Google committing 2.7 GW of capacity for a major AI project, and an agreement involving Microsoft, Chevron and Engine No. 1 to build 2.5 GW of gas-fired generation in Texas.

Its argument is that Nigeria’s underused gas could find a major new customer in AI data centres, much as it has begun to in the United States, turning a domestic resource into the power source for digital infrastructure.

Why it matters

For Nigeria, keeping data and the value it generates onshore is increasingly treated as strategic, adding to the push to build capacity locally rather than route workloads abroad. That build-out also relies on subsea cables and peering networks that carry the data.

The case is made by the African Energy Chamber, which convenes the sector and has an interest in tying data-centre demand to the gas industry, and the market projections are its own. Power reform, regulatory clarity and connectivity will determine how much of the projected boom actually arrives. The demand is not in doubt; whether Nigeria can keep the lights on for it is the open question.

AethexAI, a UK-based voice-infrastructure company founded by a team drawn from Meta, Stanford and Goldman Sachs, has raised a $3 million pre-seed round, the company announced. It has rebuilt the voice-AI stack for the high-latency, low-bandwidth conditions of African and Middle Eastern telephony, where it says Western models often fail in production due to cost and connectivity.

Built for the network, not around it

AethexAI owns its full stack: a proprietary dialect-native model it calls Kora 1, wired directly into managed telephony and call orchestration rather than layered on top of third-party services. The company puts its voice-AI cost at $0.035 per minute, compared with $0.10 or more that it says global providers charge in markets they have not optimised for.

Already in production

The company is not pre-revenue. It says it handles up to 15,000 calls a day for enterprise customers in West Africa, including a West African call centre operator. Founders Mariama Diallo and Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa moved the business from San Francisco to London, arguing that the underlying voice interface needs a full redesign for these markets.

The backers

The round was led by 4DX Ventures, with participation from Enza Capital and angel investors including researchers from Anthropic and faculty at Stanford. Both 4DX Ventures and Enza Capital are active backers of African technology companies, and the deal adds to a run of investment in the continent’s AI, from sovereign-AI partnerships to compute-grant programmes. AethexAI said the funding will go towards scaling deployments, growing its team and expanding product coverage across key regional markets.

Why it matters

Voice is still the dominant way millions of Africans reach their banks, telecoms operators, and utilities, often over mobile networks that drop packets and introduce delays. Automated agents that run reliably and cheaply on those networks would sharply cut the cost of serving customers who may never use an app, which is the wager behind both the product and the raise.

AethexAI did not name its enterprise customers or provide any details beyond its lead investor, and the performance and pricing figures are the company’s own.

Whether dialect-native models can hold up across the continent’s many languages and patchy networks is the test the new funding now buys time to run.

More than half of active users on Paymenow’s earned-wage access (EWA) platform are under 35, the South African financial-wellness company said in data released for Youth Month. Young users accounted for 53.5% of platform activity by volume and 45.7% by value in the most recent reporting period.

Small top-ups for the basics

The average youth transaction was R260, against R354 for users aged 36 to 60, consistent with EWA’s design as a top-up between paydays. Transport and food accounted for 44.6% of young users’ cash-outs: 26.2% on transport and 18.4% on food, with an additional 7.6% going to medical emergencies.

“The data paints a picture of a generation of working young South Africans using their earned wages to cover the basics: transport, putting food on the table, and dealing with unexpected medical bills,” said Denise Neethling, Head of Marketing at Paymenow. “Earned-wage access is being used in exactly the way it was designed: as a small, regular top-up between paydays that helps people manage cash flow without taking on debt.”

A young, in-app cohort

Young users also dominate spending within the app, accounting for 58.4% of airtime purchases, 58.6% of data, 64.0% of in-app transport bookings, and 51.3% of voucher activity. Older users lead on electricity (56.4%) and fuel (62.5%), reflecting a life stage with more households and cars to run.

From wage access to financial education

Under-35s completed 1,228,305 lessons in Paymenow’s in-app financial-education programme, 55.1% of all completions and more than the adult and senior cohorts combined. The most-completed modules covered credit scores, basic financial wellness, budgeting and savings.

Some 68.1% of registered young users have run a credit-score check through the app, and 2,412 young savers have set aside R1.05 million through its savings product. Paymenow has broadened from pure wage access into a wider financial-wellness platform, with budgeting tools, credit tracking and savings sitting alongside the core EWA feature.

Why it matters

Earned-wage access has spread quickly among South African employers as a payday-lending alternative, letting workers draw pay they have already earned rather than borrow against it. The appeal, in a high-inflation economy, is cash flow without new debt. It sits alongside a fast-growing set of African fintech tools, from mobile money to digital banking.

The figures are Paymenow’s own platform data rather than an independent market study, and cover only its user base. Even so, they sketch how a cohort of young workers is now managing the gaps between paydays.

PayAngel, a UK-based cross-border payments company started by migrants, is expanding its payout reach through a collaboration with Visa and the payments firm Currencycloud, it announced. The tie-up is meant to speed up transfers and make settlements smoother across the markets it serves.

What the deal adds

PayAngel offers fee-free transfers, competitive exchange rates and settlement across 22 African countries, as well as India and Bangladesh. By plugging into Currencycloud’s regulated infrastructure and Visa Direct, Visa’s money-movement network, it says it can streamline settlement and move funds more efficiently.

The company also runs a business-to-business (B2B) web portal that lets firms handle collections, disbursements and cross-border settlement without a local presence or complex integrations.

The cost of sending money home

The World Bank has long ranked sub-Saharan Africa as the costliest region in the world to send money to, with fees eating into remittances that many households rely on. Cheaper, faster rails are the pitch behind most new entrants, including PayAngel.

“Access to dependable, well-governed payment rails is essential to supporting globally connected communities,” said Jones Amegbor, CEO of PayAngel. “This collaboration strengthens the infrastructure behind our platform, helping us deliver faster and more efficient cross-border payments while staying focused on the human connections those payments represent.”

Philip Konopik, a senior vice-president at Visa Europe, said Visa Direct was focused on enabling secure money movement across the global payments system and on working with fintechs to improve how money moves for consumers and businesses.

Why it matters

Remittances are a major and growing flow into African economies, and the cost of moving them remains stubbornly high. Rivals are crowding in, from stablecoin payouts to mobile-money tie-ups. Partnerships that route diaspora transfers through established networks like Visa are one way smaller fintechs try to compete on speed and price.

PayAngel did not disclose transaction volumes, user numbers or specific pricing, and its description of fee-free transfers and competitive rates is the company’s own. Whether the partnership can durably undercut a corridor that has stayed expensive for decades is the harder test.

Memory prices are set to climb sharply as manufacturers divert capacity to AI infrastructure. The research firm Gartner forecasts DRAM prices rising by 125% and NAND flash prices by 234%, feeding broad increases in IT hardware costs. For African organisations already stretched by supply-chain delays and tight budgets, that adds pressure to decisions about when to replace ageing equipment, says refurbished-technology provider Qrent.

Stretched refresh cycles

Rising costs and unstable supply are pushing companies to delay projects and extend the life of existing hardware, with procurement increasingly driven by price rather than need, Qrent says.

“Businesses are facing a growing imbalance between operational demand and available budget,” said Kwirirai Rukowo, managing executive for the Middle East and Africa at Qrent. “Projects are being delayed, refresh cycles are being extended and procurement decisions are increasingly being driven by cost pressure rather than operational requirements.” He warned that stretching ageing infrastructure too far trades a short-term saving for long-term risk.

The refurbished pitch

Qrent’s answer is refurbished enterprise hardware, which it says is less exposed to manufacturing delays, semiconductor allocation and shipping constraints than new equipment, and cheaper upfront. The company also rents refurbished devices as a bridge when new hardware lead times stretch out.

“Most organisations do not require the latest hardware specifications to maintain productivity,” Rukowo said. “What matters most is having reliable technology available when the business needs it.”

Qrent has a direct interest in that shift: refurbishing, renting and reselling used IT equipment is its business.

Why it matters

Across much of Africa, IT hardware is an imported, hard-currency cost, so global price rises bite harder where local currencies are weak and capital budgets are thin. A memory-price surge driven by AI demand abroad lands as a continuity problem for businesses at home.

The price forecasts are Gartner’s, and the refurbished-as-a-solution framing is Qrent’s. Either way, the era of cheap memory that underpinned the cloud looks to be pausing, and African IT buyers will feel the squeeze.

TESPOK, which operates the Kenya Internet Exchange Point (KIXP), said on 12 May 2026 that its two Mombasa points of presence (PoP) are now fully interconnected. They sit in data centres run by ICOLO, a Digital Realty company, at Miritini (ICOLO Mombasa 1) and Nyali (ICOLO Mombasa 2).

An internet exchange point (IXP) allows networks to exchange traffic directly rather than routing it through third parties abroad. Linking the two Mombasa sites means traffic can pass between them locally, which TESPOK says improves resilience and redundancy for connected networks. If one site loses power or connectivity, members can keep exchanging traffic through the other.

Why the coast matters

Mombasa is Kenya’s main subsea-cable landing point, where several international cables come ashore. Concentrating peering capacity there, rather than only in Nairobi, keeps more coastal traffic local and shortens the path between networks and the content they exchange. Mombasa’s cables also serve landlocked neighbours, which makes interconnection in the coastal region regionally significant.

TESPOK described the setup as a distributed model that supports more efficient traffic exchange while extending local interconnection beyond the capital. It echoes a wider regional pattern, with exchanges expanding peering and caching outside their home cities.

KIXP’s move follows other coastal activity, including the launch of LINX Mombasa, as Kenya builds out interconnection capacity along its seaboard.

With both Mombasa sites live and interconnected, KIXP now gives networks on the coast an alternative to backhauling their traffic to Nairobi simply to peer.

The Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN) said its peak traffic crossed 2 Tbps in March 2026, up from about 1 Tbps in April 2025, with more than 130 networks connected across several data centres.

Hyperscalers are the engine

Independent routing data compiled by bgp.tools lists 129 networks across 158 routers connected to IXPN’s main Lagos fabric, a figure that aligns with the exchange’s own count of more than 130. They include Google, with its dedicated Global Cache, alongside Meta, Microsoft, Cloudflare, Amazon and Akamai.

Those names matter more than the raw count. When a hyperscaler installs a cache at the exchange, requests for its content, from video streams to app updates and social feeds, are answered from Lagos rather than from Europe or North America. That both reflects and feeds the traffic growth: more local content gives networks more reason to peer, and more peers pull in more content.

Nigeria’s own operators sit on the same fabric, among them MTN Nigeria, Airtel, Globacom, ipNX, Spectranet and MainOne, so traffic between local providers and global platforms increasingly stays inside the country.

What an internet exchange does

An internet exchange point (IXP) is a shared infrastructure where networks exchange traffic directly rather than routing it through third parties abroad. Keeping that exchange local shortens the distance data has to travel, which IXPN says gives members lower latency, lower transit costs, stronger resilience and faster content delivery.

A year of doubling

IXPN passed the 1 Tbps mark in April 2025. Crossing 2 Tbps eleven months later tracks both rising data demand in Nigeria and the steady expansion of content caches at the exchange.

By keeping a larger share of traffic local, the exchange reduces the amount of Nigerian internet data that has to leave the country and return, a pattern that historically has added cost and delay.

Part of a wider African shift

Nigeria’s growth mirrors a broader continental push to keep traffic local. South Africa’s NAPAfrica is Africa’s largest internet exchange by traffic, and several markets have expanded peering and local caching as more operators and content networks plug in.

With peak traffic doubling inside a year and the major content networks already on-net, IXPN’s trajectory suggests Nigeria is steadily building the local interconnection it needs to keep its own internet traffic at home.

A clinician opens the next case on her screen. The system has already prepared the intake from the mother’s message: symptoms, duration, the child’s age, the language she wrote in, a paediatric flag, a routine priority. The original message sits beside the structured version in the mother’s own words. A lab result from three months ago is loaded. She reads the brief in under a minute and decides to bring the child in this afternoon rather than book for Wednesday.

Over the past few years, the DHS Africa teams in Munich, Nairobi, and Kampala have built digital healthcare systems for hospitals and clinics across multiple African markets, and have watched the same scene play out site after site. The literature on African digital health tends to treat scenes like this as the difficult edge case for Western enterprise systems. They are closer to the case healthcare AI was meant to handle.

The catch-up story is out of date

For the last decade, digital health in African markets has been described as a catch-up story. The continent will eventually build the kind of enterprise software the United States and Europe already run, including Epic, Cerner, and the rest of the stack, and AI will then arrive as an upper layer added on top. Funders, ministries, and many providers themselves treat this sequence as the natural one.

The sequence is out of date. In Western markets, the systems treated as the destination here have become the problem AI is being deployed to solve. American doctors spend close to half their working hours on data entry, with another one to two hours of charting after they get home. A decade of research has tied that documentation load to clinician burnout at a population scale. AI work at large hospitals now mostly takes the form of expensive retrofits, fitting language models and copilots into software designed for a different decade’s assumptions.

It is not a destination worth aiming for.

Where the EMR fights AI

Modern AI in clinical software depends on a few things, and the Western EMR is poor at supplying any of them.

The mismatch starts with the unit of analysis. The EMR is built around the encounter: a scheduled visit, a fifteen-minute slot, a chart note filed at the end. AI is useful across longer arcs: an inbound message at week one, a callback at week two, a clinic visit at week three, a lab result at week four. The encounter view collapses the arc into separate entries, and most of the patient story disappears between them.

There is also the question of input. Language models handle free text well: what a patient wrote in their own words, in their own language. Western systems still operate on the assumption that the only input that counts is what a doctor typed into a form. Patients rarely behaved that way, and they behave that way even less now, with messaging in their pocket and a queue at the desk.

Then there is the doctor’s place in the workflow. AI can structure intake, draft summaries, flag patterns, suggest routing. The doctor reads, approves, overrides, decides. American medicine still expects her to also type the underlying note from scratch. Adding AI to that workflow tends to add another click rather than remove one, because the architecture pushes against the integration.

Those properties are not abstract. They determine whether AI in a clinic saves time or wastes more of it.

What is being built in African clinics looks different

Scenes like the one above are routine across the hospitals and clinics where DHS Africa has these systems running in production. The case is the visible unit of work, and it crosses channels constantly.

An episode often starts with a mother sending a WhatsApp message in mixed English and a local language. The system detects the language, extracts the symptoms and duration, scores priority, flags the case for paediatric routing, and surfaces it so the doctor has the file open before she reaches for it. The mother is given a callback or an appointment later that day. When she arrives, the walk-in registration pulls up the case already in progress. The doctor examines the child. The lab order goes in through the same record. Results return to the mother by SMS the next day. A follow-up reminder is scheduled.

None of this is exotic. It is what care looks like when patients reach a clinic through the channels they actually use, namely WhatsApp, USSD, SMS, phone, and the front desk, and when the software around them is built around that fact.

The same pattern shows up in other workflows. Community health workers in villages capturing field data on offline-first tablets that sync once the device has signal. Prescription refills handled through WhatsApp, with follow-up by phone and payment through mobile money on the same case. Different on the surface, identical in architecture.

In Kenya and Uganda, this is the default rather than the workaround. Mobile money handles a large share of clinic payments. Between them, WhatsApp and USSD reach most of the patient population a clinic will see in any given week. Systems that ignore those channels lose patients before the doctor ever sees them.

Where the two fit together

The work of maintaining continuity across a WhatsApp message, a callback, a walk-in, and a follow-up is what these clinics already do. The case is the unit on the ground, and so the case is the unit in the system. There is no extra layer to build before AI can think across encounters.

Intake comes in as text written by patients in their own words, in their own languages, on the phones they have. Reading that and turning it into a structured brief is the kind of work language models do well. It also happens to be the work that produces the biggest operational win: a free-text inbound message becomes a one-screen brief a doctor can read in under a minute.

The doctor reads and decides. The AI prepares the case before she opens it. By the time the file is in front of her, with the structured summary, the original message, and the last lab from three months ago, the work an American doctor would still be doing after dinner has already happened. She is not the data-entry layer, and the documentation burden that has reshaped American medicine does not exist in the same form.

What this produces is software in which AI sits inside the workflow rather than on top of a record. The doctor works above the AI. The record becomes the workflow’s output rather than its starting point.

The risk is that this gets missed

Ministry of Health meetings often see a vendor with thirty years of hospital deployments in North America present alongside a lighter system designed around USSD intake and offline-first sync. The room tends to lean toward the familiar option. As ministries scale digital programmes and donors write larger cheques, that gravitational pull becomes the real risk.

That default would be a mistake. The familiar systems are not bad in their own context. Their architectural assumptions do not match how care moves on the ground in these markets. Software built for scheduled appointments at a single institution will struggle with an episode that lives across a WhatsApp thread, a field worker visit, and a callback. The retrofit work to make it fit will absorb the capacity that should have gone into actually improving care.

Lightness is sometimes treated as a virtue of necessity, a polite way of describing what providers in resource-constrained settings have to settle for. That framing is wrong. The lightness of the digital health stack being built in African markets is a property of correct architecture. Treating it as a compromise gets the causal direction wrong.

The window is open now

The question for the providers, ministries, and funders building these systems is whether they recognise what they have. The catch-up story badly underrates it.

The architectural choices that look like adaptation to local constraint, namely case-based rather than encounter-based, multi-channel rather than portal-based, and doctor as reviewer rather than as typist, happen to be the choices the healthcare AI literature has been recommending for years. American and European hospitals will likely arrive at a version of the same shape eventually, after several billion dollars of retrofit work and a decade of friction. The sites DHS Africa works with across Kenya and Uganda are already operating that way.

Providers, ministries, and funders building now have the chance to do this on purpose, before the temptation to copy a more familiar architecture closes the window.

Niklas Inderst is the CEO of DH Solutions Africa (DHS Africa), with operations in Kampala, Nairobi, and Munich.

Disclosure: DHS Africa develops and sells digital healthcare systems referenced in the topic of this column.

The telecoms group announced the moves on 2 June 2026, all effective no later than 1 September 2026.

A long-serving HR chief retires

Ng’ambi, currently chief executive of MTN Côte d’Ivoire, succeeds Paul Norman, who is retiring after nearly three decades at the company. She has led MTN operations across several markets, including Cameroon and Rwanda, and previously held roles at Airtel Tigo Ghana and Tigo Senegal.

Mitwa will lead MTN’s people and culture agenda at a pivotal time in our Ambition 2030 journey,” said Ralph Mupita, MTN Group president and chief executive. “She will take the reins from Paul, who will retire after a stellar career at MTN and having made a significant contribution to the business over almost three decades.

Mupita was pointing to the group strategy MTN unveiled alongside its 2025 results.

New CEOs for Côte d’Ivoire and Zambia

Abbad Reda, currently the chief executive of MTN Zambia, will lead MTN Côte d’Ivoire. He has held senior roles at MTN in Afghanistan, Liberia and Ghana.

Larry Annetts, a 29-year MTN veteran who has served as chief marketing and chief commercial officer, becomes chief executive of MTN Zambia. He has also worked at MTN South Africa and MTN Nigeria.

The reshuffle follows other recent senior changes at the group, including the appointment of Lwazi Bam as group chief risk officer. MTN, Africa’s largest mobile operator by subscribers, has been reshaping its leadership as it pushes fintech and data services across its markets.

The appointments take effect on 1 September 2026.

The round, announced on 1 June 2026, was backed by Impact Fund Denmark, Equitane, and the Fund for Export Development in Africa (FEDA), the development finance arm of the African Export-Import Bank.

Battery swapping at scale

Spiro builds electric motorcycles and runs a battery-swapping network that lets riders exchange a depleted battery for a charged one in minutes, sidestepping the wait of plug-in charging. It operates in seven countries: Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Togo, Benin, Nigeria and Cameroon.

The company has deployed 100,000 electric vehicles and 2,500 swap stations, with manufacturing plants in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda and a battery-recycling facility in Nigeria.

Across seven active markets, our deployment of 100,000 electric vehicles and 2,500 smart-swap stations has turned sustainable mobility into an affordable, everyday reality,” said Gagan Gupta, founder of Spiro and chairman of Equitane.

Where the money goes

Spiro said the capital will expand its swapping network, strengthen manufacturing and assembly, fund technology development and take it into new markets, naming the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia as next targets.

Petrol motorcycle taxis are a backbone of urban transport across much of Africa, and swapping rather than charging avoids both the upfront cost of a battery and the unreliability of grid power. Spiro says running one of its motorcycles can cut daily costs by up to 40%, or around $2 a day, compared to a fossil-fuel equivalent.

The raise adds to a growing pool of capital chasing Africa’s two-wheeler electrification, where operators such as Max.ng are racing to put more electric vehicles on the road.