By The rave of the technology space today across the globe is Artificial Intelligence (AI) but the data centers in Nigeria are not yet AI ready to deploy core AI solutions.
And that is real, according to the Chief Executive Officer of Digital Realty, Engr Ike Nnamani who during the first CEO Breakfast roundtable, organized by the Nigeria Information Technology Reporters’ Association (NITRA), said: “the closest we have today in terms of data center infrastructure, is infrastructure that can do cloud, and we have cloud services running.”
He however noted that there are well over 300 members of an AI association in Nigeria that are all using AI services, like selling different things in AI, developing different things in AI.
He disclosed that when it comes to core AI, none of the data centers was designed for core AI application saying, “the question which will be asked is what is the plan to build AI-enabled data centers? What are the people that have the technology, the finance to be able to do such stuff, right?
Speaking further, Nnamani stated: “that is probably where global players like Digital Reality comes in, and the equities of this world come in, because these are the global players.
“Globally, people that have the knowledge, because in some data centers, they already own globally. They’ve been able to implement AI infrastructure.”
According to him, the global players have been able to implement AI infrastructure noting that they also have the financial muscle to be able to do it.
While harping on the need to now bring AI local just like data hosting, he urged that new data centers have to be built that are designed from day one to be able to take AI infrastructure and services that will run on it.
Nnamani noted that Nigeria is probably two to three years away from that, stressing “until that happens, AI applications will continue to take place and be supported from wherever people can see infrastructure to support it.”
He added: “In our subsidiary company in South Africa, TerraCo, they just built a data center that is ready for AI, that has liquid cooling and all that stuff. But TerraCo has done it. They are the biggest in Africa by landmine.
“One of their data centers is bigger than all the data centers in Nigeria combined in terms of IT load. One of their data centers in South Africa.”
Speaking about the massive work of Digital Realty in Nigeria after it rebranded from Medallion Communications, he said that most the roads projects never started as CSR project saying that without the roads, “we wouldn’t have been able to build the data center.”
He added: “As a matter of fact, when I had to defend this with the Digital Reality Group, the first problem we had was that we didn’t have any cost center to allocate such an investment.
“Because it has never been done anywhere where Digital Reality was building roads or doing their own power. But we had to explain that to deliver to Africa because that site was built for the two Africa submarine cable. If not, Africa would not have successfully come into Nigeria if we didn’t do what we needed to do.”
According to him, what Digital Realty has done benefited the local community, and created employment stressing that “as part of our process, we ensure that we hire people within that locality, both doing construction, operation, and post support. So just to at least build that community, we did a lot of training in terms of training the workforce.”
Nnamani revealed that his company is going to still build more facilities, such as bigger hyper-scale facility, adding that when it comes to AI, it has to be a hyper-scale facility.
