Executives from Africa’s digital infrastructure, telecom, and cloud industries have called for urgent reforms to unlock the continent’s next phase of digital growth.
They stressed the importance of power in digitising the continent. Gathered at the Hyperscalers Convergence Africa 2025 summit in Lagos, with the theme: “The Power of Convergence,” the forum had leading figures from across the global data and connectivity ecosystem to confront Africa’s infrastructure bottlenecks – from energy and regulation to talent flight and financing.
Opening the summit, the Executive Director of Africa Hyperscalers, Temitope Osunrinde, framed the opportunity and the challenge. Osunrinde noted that investment momentum is building rapidly as global vacancy rates fall below one per cent, citing subsea cable expansions by Meta and Google, as well as new builds from Visa, Equinix, Raxio, Digital Realty, and Nvidia. He warned that 600 million Africans still lacked electricity, even as new data centres consume the equivalent of small cities.
“The challenge is not only to power homes but to power Africa’s digital economy. Governments must fast-track approvals, open telecom networks to competition, and incentivise renewable energy. 50 per cent of a data centre’s cost is equipment – imagine the impact if that could enter Africa tax-free.”
In his keynote, the Chief Executive of Apolo.us and Executive Chair for Data Centre Programmes at Informa, Bill Kleyman, called Africa “one of the world’s fastest-growing digital markets” but warned that energy shortages could choke progress.
Kleyman noted that data-centre power demand on the continent was growing at 20 to 25 per cent yearly and could reach 8,000 gigawatt-hours. On a panel about scaling to 2,500 MW of capacity, CEO of Kasi Cloud, Johnson Agogbua, warned that talent, not technology, could become the greatest bottleneck, asking: “We’ll solve power and connectivity, but can we train enough people and keep them here?”
General Manager for Infrastructure & Cloud Engineering at MTN Nigeria, Roger Shutte, echoed the same concern: “As we skill people up, how do we enable them to stay, to support local businesses, and to provide the digital sovereignty we require?”
CEO of the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria, Muhammed Rudman, said IXPN is working to “domesticate content” and reduce reliance on international routes.
The Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, used the AI and policy sessions to lay out a practical roadmap for sovereignty at scale.
