MTN, Airtel Bet $400M on Cloud and AI to Win Over Nigerian Startups
TLDR
- MTN and Airtel are investing nearly $400 million to expand from voice and data into cloud and AI services
- The telcos aim to compete with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure by pricing in naira, promising AI-grade compute power
- Both face competition from global cloud providers and local challengers such as Nobus Cloud and Layer3
MTN and Airtel are investing nearly $400 million to expand from voice and data into cloud and AI services, targeting Nigeria’s growing startup ecosystem.
The two telcos aim to compete with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure by pricing in naira, promising AI-grade compute power, and offering accelerator programmes. Their strategy comes as Nigerian businesses spent an estimated $600–$850 million on cloud services in 2024, most of it flowing overseas.
MTN is investing in local cloud infrastructure, including a Tier 4 data centre, with $120 million already spent and $135 million planned. It plans to undercut global rates by 15–20% while offering local hosting to reduce latency and enhance data sovereignty. Airtel, meanwhile, is building Nigeria’s first hyperscale data centre, valued at $120 million, to serve AI workloads with high-performance GPUs.
Both face competition from global cloud providers and local challengers such as Nobus Cloud and Layer3. Adoption, experts say, will hinge on reliability, performance, and whether startups trust local infrastructure over established global players.
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Key Takeaways
Nigeria’s cloud computing market is projected to reach $1.03 billion in 2025 and $3.28 billion by 2030 (Mordor Intelligence). Yet most spending today exits the country, with AWS, Microsoft, and Google capturing the lion’s share. For startups earning in naira but paying cloud bills in dollars, currency devaluation has made global providers costly, with the naira sliding from ₦471/$ in 2023 to ₦1,534/$ in August 2025. MTN and Airtel want to turn that pain point into a competitive edge by billing locally and offering AI-ready capacity. Their investment is small compared with the $180 billion hyperscale spending by global giants in 2025 alone, but their advantage lies in proximity, naira pricing, and alignment with Nigeria’s push for digital sovereignty. Whether this shift keeps tech spending local will depend on if telcos can match the reliability, developer experience, and incentives that global players provide.
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