Stakeholders chart path to Africa’s AI-powered growth

Africa’s ambition to harness artificial intelligence (AI) as a force for economic transformation took the centre stage at the Vertiv AI Solutions Innovation Roadshow held in Lagos.
 
The 2025 edition brought together technology leaders, policymakers and enterprise decision-makers to tackle a critical question: what infrastructure must Africa build today to unlock AI at scale tomorrow?
 
Held under the theme: ‘Powering the Future of Enterprise Innovation’, the Roadshow underscored that AI is far beyond a fleeting trend: it is reshaping industries, redefining competitiveness, and driving nations towards new growth frontiers.
 
Director for Colocation and Hyperscale at Vertiv, Jon Abbott, in his keynote, titled: ‘AI Data Centres and the African Opportunity’, emphasised that AI demands a new compute architecture, requiring an equally transformative rethink of Africa’s data centres, power systems, and connectivity frameworks.
 
The event’s highlight was a high-impact panel featuring the CEO of Kasi Cloud, Johnson Agogbua; Director, Solutions Architects (West Africa), Equinix, Oluwasayo Oshadami;
President and CEO of NewWave Holdings LLC, Patrick Munis; Country Managing Director of Digital Realty, Ikechukwu Nnamani, and Country Director, Turner and Townsend, Gerald Madondo.
 
Drawing parallels to Nigeria’s GSM revolution, panellists noted that AI has the potential to leapfrog legacy barriers and ignite an even larger wave of innovation if the foundational infrastructure is built now.