Nigeria’s difficult power environment may have forced its data center operators to build a level of resilience that is directly relevant to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s new data localization directive, industry leaders said during an Africa Hyperscalers webinar on the future of financial data hosting in the country.

Speaking at the session, themed “From Regulation to Infrastructure: What the CBN’s Data Localization Directive Means for Nigeria’s Digital Economy,” Gbenga Adegbiji, Chief Executive Officer, Geniserve, said the assumption that Nigeria’s power challenges automatically weaken local data center readiness misses how the industry has evolved. According to him, Nigerian operators have spent years designing around grid instability, creating operating models that rely on redundancy, backup systems, generator control, and disciplined power management. 

“You possibly have people that understand how to engineer resilience in power in Nigeria much more than you have in the US. You can quote me,” Adegbiji said, noting that engineers in more stable markets often treat generators as short-duration backup systems, while Nigerian operators design for a much harsher operating reality. 

He argued that this experience has produced a more practical understanding of power resilience. In Nigeria, he said, operators know that grid supply cannot be assumed, so the resilience design must extend beyond a single backup layer. For data centers supporting banks, payment processors and fintech workloads, that means planning for power continuity, backup of backup systems, failover, monitoring and operating procedures designed for sustained disruption rather than ideal conditions.

Adegbiji said concerns about power should be separated from the readiness of professionally operated data centers. While Nigeria may not have reliable grid power, he said data center operators understand the central role of power in uptime and have engineered around the country’s operating realities. He also pointed to the use of multiple data centers for resilience, with banks able to run primary infrastructure in one facility and disaster recovery in another, rather than concentrating critical systems in a single location.

Ayotunde Coker, Chief Executive Officer, Open Access Data Centres, also noted that power availability is now a global infrastructure concern, not only an African challenge. He said African markets have access to multiple energy sources, including gas, hydro and geothermal in some locations, and stressed that the critical issue is how power is planned, secured and integrated into resilient data center operations.

The comments came as banks, fintechs, mobile money operators and other payment service providers prepare for the CBN directive requiring payment transaction data generated in Nigeria to be stored and managed locally by January 1, 2027. The policy has triggered debate over whether Nigeria has sufficient cloud, data center, interconnection, disaster recovery and cybersecurity capacity to support mission-critical financial workloads at scale.

But speakers at the virtual roundtable said the debate should not be framed as a simple question of whether Nigeria has infrastructure. Instead, they argued that the market has matured significantly, with certified data centers, existing bank colocation models, local interconnection, disaster recovery arrangements and years of regulatory scrutiny already in place.

Adegbiji said Nigerian data centers are built to global standards, adding that certification frameworks do not change by geography. “There is no Nigerian Tier 3 or UK Tier 3. It is Tier 3,” he said, explaining that certified facilities are tested for resilience, power, heat, capacity and operational reliability. He said some Nigerian facilities have been engineered to operate at very high availability levels because operators understand the country’s peculiar environment. 

The broader message from the session was that the CBN directive is moving data localization from policy conversation to infrastructure execution. For Nigeria’s financial sector, the issue is no longer only where data sits, but whether banks, fintechs, cloud providers, data center operators and regulators can coordinate migration in a way that is secure, resilient and commercially sustainable.

Industry leaders said the directive could create one of the strongest demand signals yet for local cloud platforms, data centers, interconnection providers and managed infrastructure companies. However, they also called for clearer implementation guidance from the CBN, particularly for fintechs that were built on global cloud platforms and may not be fully aware of the local infrastructure capacity now available in Nigeria.

Adegbiji said the immediate task is education, clarification and practical migration planning. Traditional banks, he noted, already use local colocation and disaster recovery models, while many newer fintechs were “born in the cloud” and may need more awareness of what exists locally.

The session concluded that Nigeria’s power challenges remain real, but they do not automatically disqualify local infrastructure. Instead, speakers argued that those challenges have shaped an operating culture in which resilience is designed from the start, not added as an afterthought. For the CBN’s localization policy, that may become one of the strongest arguments for trusting credible Nigerian data center operators with regulated financial workloads.