Nigerian Cloud Startups Rise to Challenge Global Giants
2025-02-27
Facing exorbitant dollar-denominated AWS bills and currency volatility, Nigerian entrepreneur Fara Ashiru migrated her fintech platform Okra's cloud infrastructure to local data centers, launching Nebula to offer cloud services with naira payments. This spurred a surge in Nigerian cloud startups like Nobus, Galaxy, Suburban, and Layer3, providing affordable, localized alternatives and addressing data sovereignty concerns. While giants like AWS now accept naira, local providers leverage data sovereignty, low latency, and cost-effective colocation strategies to compete. However, they face challenges in infrastructure and user experience improvements to match global giants.