Two of Nigeria’s most influential digital economy leaders – Dr. Aminu Maida, Executive Vice Chairman/Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), and Mr. Tony Izuagbe Emoekpere, President of the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) – have called for bold collaboration, accelerated investment, and inclusive policy frameworks to prepare Africa for large-scale artificial intelligence adoption.
Speaking at the Africa Hyperscalers AI-Readiness Session, Dr. Aminu Maida, Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), said AI has become “part of the basic infrastructure of competitiveness, just like roads, power, and ports.” According to him, Africa’s ability to shape the global AI economy depends on whether it can strengthen its networks, power systems, compute capacity, cloud environments, and regulatory frameworks fast enough to match the continent’s rapid digital growth. Dr. Maida noted that countries that build the right foundations will unlock new productivity, new jobs, and new opportunities, while those that do not risk becoming consumers of foreign innovation rather than creators of their own.
He emphasized that Africa must address three urgent gaps: limited access to affordable computing power, the algorithmic gap created when AI models are trained predominantly on non-African data, and the data gap caused by uncollected, fragmented, or siloed national datasets. Dr. Maida highlighted NCC’s ongoing work to expand broadband, lower access costs, deepen last-mile connectivity, improve data center reliability, support hybrid and green energy solutions, and promote cloud adoption. He also pointed to the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy and Nigeria’s first multilingual large language model, which aims to embed Nigerian languages into global AI systems and ensure that African contexts are not erased in global datasets. “African voices and realities must be visible in the datasets that shape global AI,” he said.
In his keynote, ATCON President Tony Izuagbe Emoekpere said AI is already transforming telecom operations in Nigeria, shifting networks from reactive systems to intelligent ecosystems that can predict faults, optimize performance, and self-heal. He explained that AI-driven predictive maintenance, customer service automation, smarter spectrum management, improved energy efficiency, enhanced fraud detection, and new personalized services are redefining what telecom operators can offer. He emphasized that many of these opportunities are “low-hanging fruit” that Nigerian operators can deploy immediately, with some already experimenting with AI-enabled sensors, drones, and automation tools. However, he cautioned that technology alone is not enough. “No single operator, regulator, or company can build Nigeria’s AI-driven telecom ecosystem alone. We need collaboration across policy, infrastructure, investment, and skills,” he said.
Mr. Emoekpere stressed that Nigeria must urgently develop more AI engineers, network intelligence specialists, and cloud practitioners to match the growing demand, adding that skills could become the sector’s greatest bottleneck. He also noted that telecoms enable every other digital sector — fintech, healthtech, edtech, smart agriculture, and enterprise services – and therefore have a central role in driving Nigeria’s broader AI transition.
Both keynote speakers agreed that Africa must move quickly to build the infrastructure required for AI at scale. They called for deeper collaboration among hyperscalers, regulators, telecom operators, energy providers, data center operators, innovators, and development partners. Dr. Maida closed with a challenge to the sector, stating, “The digital future is shared. The collaborations we build today will determine whether Africa becomes a creator or a consumer in the AI age.”
Held virtually, the AI Infrastructure Readiness Session brought together senior policymakers, telecom operators, cloud providers, hyperscaler executives, and data center leaders from across Africa and beyond. The forum offered a rare cross-sector perspective on the continent’s AI preparedness, with participants examining the infrastructure gaps, investment priorities, and regulatory shifts required to support AI workloads at scale. The session was convened in partnership with Vertiv and the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON).
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