AFRICLOUD opens cloud region for Sahel, West Africa

by OKORO CHINEDU
LAGOS, (CAJ News) – THE opening of a third region by AFRICLOUD in Nigeria is a strategic milestone for the cloud infrastructure company and the broader regional tech ecosystem.

On Monday, the United States-headquartered company announced that it had opened the region, operating from Lagos.

As such, cloud servers can now be deployed inside Nigeria from a carrier-neutral data centre in the Lagos central business district, and orders are open to all customers through the AFRICLOUD dashboard.

By establishing a physical footprint in Nigeria, the company eliminates the necessity for local start-ups, enterprises and public-sector organisations to host workloads abroad. This directly addresses strict regulatory frameworks such as the Nigeria Data Protection Act (NDPA) and internal procurement policies that mandate in-country data storage.

The Lagos centre acts as a regional hub that not only serves Nigeria but also extends high-performance terrestrial fibre connectivity to the landlocked Sahel region. Previously, routing traffic to these areas required expensive or inefficient hops through Europe.

Operating on the same dashboard across Johannesburg (South Africa), Lagos and Lisbon (Portugal) gives organisations a single pane of glass to manage compliance across distinct legal frameworks, such as the NDPA in Nigeria, the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) and EU regulations in Portugal, under one account.

With Lagos live, AFRICLOUD’s three regions divide the map among them.

Johannesburg serves Southern and East Africa, while Lagos serves Nigeria and much of West Africa and brings the landlocked Sahel within reach over terrestrial West African fibre, where reaching comparable infrastructure previously meant routing through Europe.

Lisbon serves North Africa and parts of West Africa alongside Europe and reaches Brazil over a direct subsea route between Portugal and South America.

“Nigeria is Africa’s largest internet market, and until now most Nigerian workloads have been hosted abroad by necessity,” said Oluniyi Ajao, founder of AFRICLOUD.

“The Lagos region changes the default. Nigerian data can now live in Nigeria, on infrastructure built for the way this market pays and builds,” he explained.

AFRICLOUD is a relatively new entrant in the sector, having been established in 2025.

It provides compute, networking and storage services.

– CAJ News