By Bimbo Akintola

Nigeria’s digital economy entered an important phase of infrastructure development in 2023 as rising demand for cloud services, digital payments, telecommunications, enterprise technology and locally hosted data increased attention on the country’s data-centre market. Behind this expansion, however, was a less visible challenge: how to build reliable digital infrastructure while managing energy use, backup generation, waste, water, emissions and increasingly complex environmental obligations.

Industry activity illustrated the scale of the opportunity. A 2023 market assessment identified 15 existing and 10 upcoming data centres in Nigeria, with Lagos accounting for more than 90% of existing rack capacity. By November, Rack Center announced construction of its new LGS2 facility in Ikeja, Lagos—a 12MW IT-load development intended to substantially expand its existing capacity.

For environmental engineer George Daramola, developments of this nature highlight an issue that Nigeria’s digital-infrastructure conversation cannot afford to overlook: environmental management must grow alongside infrastructure capacity.

Daramola’s professional expertise spans environmental management systems, regulatory compliance, environmental auditing, hazardous-waste management, incident investigation and risk assessment. His experience offers a useful perspective on the environmental systems required as Nigeria seeks to strengthen its position as a significant West African digital-infrastructure market.

One of the most immediate issues is power.

Data centres cannot tolerate the kind of interruptions that ordinary commercial facilities may be able to absorb. Servers, networking systems and cooling infrastructure require dependable electricity around the clock. In a market where grid reliability remains a major infrastructure concern, operators must therefore consider substantial backup and alternative power arrangements.

That creates an environmental engineering challenge alongside the energy challenge.

Large numbers of generators can introduce questions surrounding emissions, fuel handling, spill prevention, hazardous materials, maintenance and environmental monitoring. Daramola’s experience is particularly relevant to this problem. His professional record includes implementing environmental management systems for mission-critical facilities covering air-quality monitoring associated with more than 300 emergency generators, as well as wastewater and hazardous-waste management.

The lesson for Nigeria’s emerging market is not that identical systems can simply be transplanted into the country. Rather, environmental controls need to be designed around Nigerian regulatory, infrastructure and operational realities.

This means environmental considerations should begin during facility planning rather than after construction.

As data-centre investments expand, developers must consider how power generation, drainage, wastewater, fuel storage, emissions, hazardous waste and emergency-response requirements interact with site design and long-term operations. Environmental risk assessment consequently becomes part of infrastructure development rather than merely an exercise conducted after a facility begins operating.

Daramola’s professional experience demonstrates this integrated approach. He has worked across environmental engineering, operations, construction and legal functions to incorporate environmental requirements into major infrastructure development. His record also shows experience managing regulatory relationships and environmental permitting across multiple jurisdictions.

For Nigeria in 2023, this kind of thinking was becoming increasingly relevant.

The country’s digital regulatory environment was itself evolving. The Nigeria Data Protection Act was signed into law on June 12, 2023, establishing the Nigeria Data Protection Commission and strengthening the institutional foundations governing the country’s expanding digital economy. Although data protection and environmental regulation address different risks, the development reflected a broader reality: as Nigeria’s digital economy matures, the physical and regulatory infrastructure supporting it must mature as well.

Environmental performance is part of that equation.

Daramola’s career provides examples of how environmental engineering can generate measurable operational outcomes. At one industrial facility, he led a problem-solving initiative associated with a 35% reduction in total waste generated, alongside hazardous-waste and regulatory-compliance improvements. In another operational environment, environmental audits, root-cause analysis and corrective measures contributed to improving an Environmental Performance Index from 94.8% to 99.52%.

Such outcomes demonstrate why environmental compliance should not automatically be viewed as an administrative cost. Properly integrated environmental systems can help organizations identify inefficiencies, reduce incidents, improve reporting and create more disciplined operational processes.

Daramola’s work with environmental reporting provides another relevant example. He developed a compliance-reporting tool that reduced time spent on regulatory reporting by more than 70%, while his responsibilities also included leading investigations into more than 50 environmental incidents and developing corrective-action measures.

For Nigeria’s growing data-centre sector, the underlying principle is important: infrastructure expansion needs systems capable of producing reliable environmental information, identifying risks early and ensuring corrective actions are traceable.

The Nigerian opportunity is substantial. Data centres can strengthen local cloud capacity, improve connectivity, support financial technology, facilitate enterprise digitalisation and reinforce the infrastructure underlying the country’s broader digital economy. The concentration of existing capacity in Lagos and the new developments announced during 2023 demonstrated increasing confidence in the market.

Yet sustainable growth will require more than constructing additional facilities.

It will require professionals who understand how environmental risk, operational reliability and regulatory requirements interact within complex infrastructure.

Daramola’s experience provides a perspective relevant to that challenge. His work across environmental management systems, incident reduction, regulatory reporting, waste minimisation and mission-critical infrastructure illustrates how environmental engineering can move beyond checking regulatory boxes to become part of operational strategy.

For Nigeria, that distinction could become increasingly important. The question facing the country’s data-centre market in 2023 was not simply how quickly capacity could be added, but how that capacity could be developed responsibly and operated reliably within Nigeria’s distinctive energy, environmental and regulatory landscape.

As investment in digital infrastructure accelerates, environmental engineering will increasingly have a place in that conversation. The next generation of Nigerian data centres will be judged not only by computing capacity and uptime, but also by how effectively operators manage the environmental footprint accompanying that growth.

And professionals with experience connecting environmental compliance to large-scale operational performance, such as George Daramola, offer a model for how those challenges can be approached.