MTN Nigeria has officially launched its new cloud data centre, a strategic move to strengthen the country’s technology ecosystem by offering affordable, locally hosted cloud services to businesses, developers, and large enterprises.
Okay.ng reports that the announcement was made by Karl Toriola, CEO of MTN Nigeria, during a press briefing on Monday ahead of the facility’s activation, which goes live Tuesday.
Toriola revealed that the new centre is the largest prefabricated commercial data centre in West Africa and is designed to drastically reduce the cost and foreign exchange (FX) volatility faced by Nigerian companies relying on offshore platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
“Today, a lot of the times, developers go and get capacity from Amazon, which is priced in dollars,” Toriola explained. “Your only other alternative is to buy your own processing and storage capacity, where you have to cough out a lot of money up front… and that is a very big barrier for new businesses to start in.”
The MTN cloud service, he said, will allow users to access IT infrastructure on a pay-as-you-go model, priced in naira, cutting FX exposure and improving latency since all data will be stored within Nigeria.
“This is going to be transformative for the technology ecosystem in Nigeria,” he added.
The platform, cloud.mtn.com, will serve both startups and major institutions — including banks, oil companies, and government agencies — and is built to support the country’s shift towards artificial intelligence-driven technologies.
Toriola also highlighted the platform’s role in ensuring data sovereignty and national security, noting that “every country wants to protect what is theirs, and data is a critical asset.”
“Hosting Nigerian businesses’ data in Nigeria and protecting them against exposures to sovereign data risks in foreign states… is a significant advantage,” he said.
In addition to its security benefits, the centre is expected to ensure compliance with local data protection regulations from the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) and the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA).
Lynda Saint-Nwafor, MTN’s Chief Enterprise Business Officer, added that the company has made massive investments to ensure its new platform matches global standards.
“I believe that we will be the first or we are the first to offer a self-orchestration data platform in Nigeria,” she said. “From tomorrow, through cloud.mtn.com, you can self-orchestrate from anywhere in the world.”
Saint-Nwafor emphasized that MTN Cloud will deliver the same capabilities offered by global hyperscale providers, eliminating the historical dependence on foreign infrastructure for Nigerian digital businesses.
