Airtel’s 42MW Nigeria Data Centre Benefits From Major Power and Cooling Backing
Airtel Africa’s planned 42-megawatt Nigeria data centre has attracted a major supporting deal as the project progresses towards its full development.
Vertiv, which will supply cooling, uninterruptible power and battery systems for the facility, has agreed to acquire UtilityInnovation Group in a transaction valued at up to $2.6 billion.
The acquisition includes technology to coordinate grid power, on-site generation and energy storage, helping AI-heavy data centres maintain their operations when conventional grids face challenges.
Airtel’s Nigerian centre is due to achieve its full 42 MW capacity across four phases by 2028. Vertiv will also commission and provide five years of local maintenance.
The project is part of a trend in which more than 85 percent of Nigerian workloads are currently hosted on public cloud infrastructures located outside the country, while only 22 percent of the most-visited websites are local.
This imbalance highlights the importance of major local data-centre projects beyond their physical scope.
Projects such as Airtel’s are designed to transform the ratio by providing enterprises with a reliable onshore option with the power resilience that increasingly demanding AI workloads require.
If the four-phase development is completed on time, then the facility will add significant local computing capacity while also contributing to the broader effort to retain more Nigerian digital workloads within the country.
