Schneider Electric is calling on Nigeria to upgrade its data centres to meet the fast-growing demand driven by artificial intelligence. The company believes the country must shift toward high-density, scalable, and energy-efficient facilities if it intends to keep pace with global technological advancement.
Ajibola Akindele, Schneider Electric’s Country President for West Africa, explained that the rapid adoption of AI across banking, healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, and government is exposing the weaknesses of Nigeria’s current data centre infrastructure. He said software has become the brain of modern data centres, helping operators anticipate demand, optimise energy consumption, and maintain stable performance even when power remains inconsistent.
Recent industry projections highlight how quickly demand is rising. A 2025 Arizton Advisory report counts 16 active data centres with a total load capacity of 136.7 MW, and 13 of those facilities are in Lagos. Research from Estate Intel shows that Nigeria’s overall data centre capacity will jump from 56.1 MW in 2025 to more than 218 MW by 2030, driven largely by AI and cloud computing needs.
Schneider Electric pointed out that AI workloads require an entirely different level of infrastructure. Training large models now demands racks that exceed 100 kW, which means operators must adopt advanced cooling systems like direct-to-chip liquid cooling. Even inference workloads—used for real-time tasks such as fraud detection and medical diagnostics, are pushing power densities to between 40 kW and 80 kW per rack, especially in colocation and edge environments.
The company warned that most Nigerian data centres use designs built for older, less demanding workloads and cannot support the intense power and cooling requirements of modern AI systems. It urged operators to move toward modular designs that can expand easily, deploy intelligent power distribution units, and rely on software-driven monitoring to cut downtime and boost efficiency.
Akindele said integrating intelligence into power, cooling, and monitoring systems will give operators the flexibility to support both today’s AI needs and the even more complex systems that will appear in the coming years.
Looking ahead, Schneider Electric predicts that by 2030, about 25 percent of new data centre racks in Nigeria will support large-scale AI training, half will handle mixed workloads, and the remaining 25 percent will focus on lighter inference tasks. The company said these projections show how vital it is for operators to invest now in AI-ready infrastructure.
Schneider Electric believes that Nigeria’s ability to take full advantage of the intelligent computing era depends on how quickly the country strengthens its data centre ecosystem. With the right investments, the company says Nigeria can support its expanding digital economy and remain competitive in an increasingly AI-driven world.
