LAGOS/Nigeria: Cloud infrastructure provider AFRICLOUD has expanded its African operations with the launch of a new region in Lagos, giving Nigerian businesses access to locally hosted cloud servers while introducing local-currency payment options across several African markets.
The Lagos facility is the company’s third African region, alongside existing infrastructure in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Lisbon, Portugal. AFRICLOUD said the arrangement allows customers operating in different parts of Africa to manage servers in multiple locations through a single account.
The company’s latest expansion addresses three areas it identifies as important to African businesses: the location of computing infrastructure, access to payment channels that do not depend on international cards, and the jurisdiction under which data is hosted.
For Nigerian customers, servers deployed in Lagos can keep computing and storage within the country. AFRICLOUD said the Lagos region also provides connectivity to markets including Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Cameroon and Burkina Faso through West African fibre routes.
The company said its network measurements show that 42 of the 53 African countries it has measured can achieve a best-case round-trip latency of below 70 milliseconds from at least one of its three regions. AFRICLOUD noted that the figures represent minimum measured paths and that actual performance can vary depending on network carriers and routing conditions.
Payment options have also been expanded. According to AFRICLOUD, customers in supported African countries can make payments through local cards, bank transfers, USSD and mobile money, with payment available in currencies including the naira, cedi, shilling and CFA franc. The company’s current documentation also lists PayPal, cryptocurrency and local payment rails among its payment options.
The development comes against the backdrop of Africa’s rapidly expanding digital-payment ecosystem. The GSMA reported that Africa accounted for 74 per cent of global mobile-money transaction volume in 2024, with 81 billion transactions recorded on the continent.
AFRICLOUD said its regional model also gives businesses greater control over where their workloads are hosted. Nigerian workloads can be deployed in Lagos, South African workloads in Johannesburg and European workloads in Lisbon, allowing customers to select infrastructure locations according to operational and regulatory requirements.
Oluniyi Ajao, founder of AFRICLOUD, said the company wanted to address the difficulties African businesses face when infrastructure location, payment and data jurisdiction are treated as separate problems.
“African businesses have been asked to choose between infrastructure that is close, infrastructure they can actually pay for, and infrastructure that keeps their data under their own law,” Ajao said. “Removing that choice is the reason we built this.”
He added that the Lagos region was particularly important for West African businesses seeking access to infrastructure without routing traffic through distant overseas locations.
The company said its three regions operate on the same technology platform, using AMD EPYC processors, all-NVMe storage and IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity. New cloud servers can be provisioned in about two minutes, while dedicated servers are available on a build-to-order basis.
AFRICLOUD’s launch has already received coverage from several technology and business publications, including Business A.M., TechBuild Africa and other outlets, largely based on the company’s September 23 announcement.
