MTN Nigeria has warned that the country faces a critical shortage of data centre capacity as artificial intelligence (AI) adoption accelerates with a current gap estimated at 90 megawatts.
The company’s Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Karl Toriola, disclosed this in Abuja on Tuesday during the 2025 Gulf Information Technology Exhibition (GITEX), where he presented a paper titled “Toward a United AI Strategy for Africa.”
Toriola said Nigeria must urgently invest in data infrastructure, stable power supply, and human capital development to support AI growth.
He noted that the scale of demand from AI systems will far outpace existing capacity. “It is estimated that data consumption from AI will be 16 times today’s level. Data centres being built globally now require energy on the scale of a nuclear power plant each, and that is where we face a huge gap,” he said.
The MTN chief called for a unified national AI strategy that harnesses resources from both the public and private sectors to build sovereign data ecosystems.
He added that such ecosystems would ensure Nigeria has control over critical computing infrastructure while fostering innovation.
“I would love to see a headline that says Nigeria has articulated a clear strategy on how to advance artificial intelligence and is executing it with discipline,” Toriola remarked.
According to him, MTN will continue to invest in technology solutions that enable consumers, SMEs, and large enterprises to capture opportunities created by AI.
The Abuja summit, which runs from September 1 to 2, and the Lagos exhibition from September 3 to 4, has attracted participation from industry leaders, academia, governments, and technology companies across Africa and beyond.
Analysts say closing the infrastructure gap will be crucial for Nigeria to compete in the global AI economy with power supply and data centre development remaining the country’s most pressing challenges.