MTN has entered the chat. Should AWS really be worried?

Nigeria’s boring cloud war just got a new contender.

If you missed Friday’s newsletter, catch up here. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, join our community, it’s a lot of fun from what I hear:

TOGETHER WITH CREDIT DIRECT

Inflation doesn’t affect everyone equally and May revealed some sharp state-level shifts.

From rising food prices in cities to growing pressure in rural areas, our latest report unpacks the real story behind the numbers.

If you haven’t read it yet, this is your chance to get informed. Download the full report and stay tuned for more editions coming your way soon.

Winning the cloud war isn’t just about pricing

When MTN launched what it described as West Africa’s largest Tier III data centre on July 1st, it wasn’t just an infrastructure flex. It was a move into one of the most consequential battles in Nigeria’s digital economy: who controls the cloud, and by extension, who controls the data, dollars, and direction of its future?

Cloud storage is now as critical as banking rails and electricity. Startups and banks depend on it. Government agencies are trying to regulate it. And the costs of accessing it, especially through global providers, are rising fast.

Cloud infrastructure can feel far removed from everyday problems it’s none of your business, but its absence is immediately visible.

In 2024, a major Nigerian bank changed its core banking software. Customers were told to expect two weeks of glitches. Months later, people still couldn’t view their transaction histories or account balances. The problem was a breakdown in how customer data was being stored and retrieved.

That major disruption underscored a bigger truth: every fintech app, banking dashboard, or telco bundle you use sits on layers of invisible storage infrastructure. While some companies store their data on-site (on-prem), most now rely on third-party data centres like Rack Centre or Equinix, or on cloud services, which let them store and access data over the internet with flexibility and scale.

The cloud is the promise of plug-and-play infrastructure: spin up servers in seconds, automate backups, access from anywhere, and scale instantly. And the big three (AWS, Azure, and Google) dominate the conversation and are global market leaders.

Yet, in Nigeria, their customers are not always pleased.

Latency is the most recurring challenge I hear across conversations with cloud engineers at Nigerian companies. With the closest AWS regions in London or Ireland, it’s easy to tell your data is being pulled from a completely different continent. Even South Africa performs worse than expected. For businesses processing real-time transactions, latency introduces delays when every millisecond matters.

Then there’s the cost. With the naira’s devaluation in 2024, companies began paying double, not because they were using more, but because the currency was doing less. Add AWS’s monthly billing model. Suddenly startups that once celebrated free cloud credits were scouring invoices for bloat. “If you don’t have engineers who understand cost optimisation,” one exec warned, “your cloud bill can get out of hand very quickly.”

CFOs are poring over cloud related line items and going home at night with new grey hairs.

Even enterprise support isn’t as smooth as it looks from the outside. While global providers offer reliable customer service, engineers are often based in time zones that don't align with West Africa’s. Escalations take longer. Outages or worse, billing errors, become slow-motion problems.

At the same time, data policies have tightened in the last few years. NITDA’s Cloud First policy and sector-specific regulations (like those from the CBN) began pushing for data localisation. Some industries, like oil & gas, outright ban storing operational data outside Nigeria.

Caught between FX costs and compliance pressure, Nigerian IT teams started looking inward.

Enter Nobus, Layer3, Galaxy Backbone, and other local players. They’ve spent the last two years pitching an alternative: cheaper cloud infrastructure, naira billing, and local data sovereignty. Their offerings lack the deep catalogues of AWS and Azure, but they make up for it with simplicity, affordability, and regulatory alignment.

It's resonating especially with government ministries, departments, and agencies. One expert estimated that some companies save 60–70% by switching to local providers. And in a world where sovereign control of digital infrastructure is becoming a national priority, it makes for great optics in investor reports and boardrooms.

But the reality is more complicated. Local providers rarely offer the full range of services that global hyperscalers do; that reality was echoed by three cloud experts who spoke to me.

“Most are just Infrastructure-as-a-Service,” one exec noted. “There’s limited support for scaling. You worry about uptime, power issues, and data loss.” Unlike AWS or Azure, which guarantee 99.9%+ availability, you can’t always hold local players to uptime guarantees. And while global platforms let you automate deployments and replicate data across regions, many Nigerian providers still require tickets and phone calls to scale basic services.

Even vendor lock-in becomes more dangerous. Global players at least offer tooling to move workloads between providers. With local vendors, switching may mean starting over entirely.

Most local players don’t offer self-orchestration (which lets companies automate and customize how their infrastructure scales). Others still rely on white-labeled backend platforms to provide backup services to customers. For the most technical of clients, some of these providers fall short.

This is where MTN’s entry gets interesting.

On July 1, MTN Nigeria launched the Sifiso Dabengwa Data Centre, a 9-megawatt facility that it claims is West Africa’s largest Tier III data centre. While MTN’s claim to West Africa’s biggest data centre is up for debate (Rack Centre expanded its facility to 12MW in April), it now looks to have made the most credible attempt at cloud parity with global players.

What’s more interesting is that MTN says its cloud platform will offer self-orchestration capabilities, which many local providers don’t have. It’s the kind of feature that allows developers and IT teams to automate deployments, manage configurations, and replicate the level of control they might get from AWS or Azure.

MTN has always had infrastructure ambitions, but launching a full-service cloud platform, backed by financial muscle, is something else entirely.

Whether they can deliver on performance, ecosystem integration, and developer trust is another question. But in a market where sovereignty and cost are converging, MTN’s move couldn’t be better timed.

More than a price war, we’re going to see a contest of trust and alignment. Global cloud providers still offer unmatched scale and a ton of AI tools. But they also represent foreign control and pricing volatility.

Local players — now joined by MTN — will keep talking up offer sovereignty, currency protection, and increasingly, feature parity. But they’ll need to invest heavily in R&D, reliability, and customer education to truly take on the global giants.

It’s hard to ignore that we’ve reached a turning point. A few years ago, the question was “Should we move to the cloud?” Now, it’s: “Whose cloud should we trust and at what cost?”

And in that question lies the future of Africa’s digital economy.

Alright, that’s it for this week. See you next week!