Tech Experts back CBN’s data localisation policy but raise concerns over the cost

On June 15, 2026, the CBN directed all banks, fintechs, mobile money operators and other payment providers to store and manage Nigeria-generated payment data locally, in line with data protection laws. They have until January 1, 2027 to comply.

Olajuwon Abayomi, Termii’s GM for Nigeria, said the shift is unavoidable in the age of AI. He said data has become “the new oil,” so it makes sense for a sovereign nation to manage it locally.

Alabi Zubair, VP of product and business development at Scandium, said foreign cloud providers can cut Nigerian companies off at any time, with nothing Nigeria can do about it since the data sits on their servers. He backed the government’s direction but said intent isn’t enough, it needs real investment from both government and private players. He also noted that while Nigerians have built many of the tech solutions in use today, the infrastructure behind them wasn’t built locally.

The infrastructure problem

Nigeria’s data centres currently provide about 50–56 megawatts of live capacity (around 124MW counting facilities still being equipped). That’s Africa’s second-largest data centre market after South Africa, 300MW by 2030. Some estimates put the current shortfall at around $600 million.

However, power is the biggest issue. Nigeria’s grid has collapsed multiple times this year, forcing data centres to rely heavily on diesel generators. Diesel prices hit over ₦3,277 per litre as of May 2026, in some states over ₦3,700. Building dedicated power for a data centre costs roughly $1 million per megawatt so a 100MW facility needs about $100 million just for power.

There’s also the question of whether local infrastructure can handle the scale. Adedapo Sobayo, CTO of fintech firm Rank, has pointed out that even though capacity has expanded, much of it hasn’t been tested under real production load. Nigeria’s payments sector processes an estimated 14 billion transactions a year so even small outages could cause big problems. Foreign cloud providers, by comparison, typically guarantee near-perfect uptime.

Not everyone sees this as a problem

Some industry players see an upside. Ayotunde Coker, CEO of Open Access Data Centres (OADC), called the policy the natural next step after over a decade of infrastructure investment, and expects it to drive fresh investment in local data centres. Others estimate the policy could keep as much as $850 million a year onshore, out of the roughly $1.1 billion Nigerian companies currently spend on foreign cloud services like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

There’s early talk that this kind of localisation rule could eventually spread beyond payments to sectors like oil and gas, manufacturing and government data. For now, the real test is execution whether local data centres can close the infrastructure gap fast enough, and whether the CBN enforces the January 2027 deadline.