Why Equinix wants Nigeria’s Internet to have a second anchor in South-South

When the Meta-backed 2Africa submarine cable landed at Qua Iboe Beach in Akwa Ibom State on February 20, 2024, it quietly rewrote a decades-old rule about Nigeria’s Internet geography. For the first time, an international subsea cable system touched Nigerian soil outside Lagos.

For a country of more than 200 million people whose global Internet traffic has historically flowed through a narrow corridor in Lagos, the landing was strategic. And for Equinix, which facilitated the landing through its subsidiary MainOne, it was the foundation of something bigger: building a second digital anchor for Nigeria in the South-South region.

In the past two years, Equinix has moved beyond the cable landing itself. It has built a modular cable landing station, rolled out roughly 250 kilometres of new terrestrial fibre linking Akwa Ibom to Rivers State, extended metro fibre in both states, and completed a new data centre in Port Harcourt known as PR1. Those layers form what the company describes as a new digital gateway.

The ambition is to reduce Lagos’ monopoly on Nigeria’s international traffic, lower latency and costs, and transform raw submarine capacity into a functioning digital ecosystem for the South-South, South-East and beyond.

Breaking Lagos’ monopoly

For years, nearly all of Nigeria’s seven subsea cables have landed in Lagos. The clustering offered operational efficiencies, centralised data centres, streamlined maintenance, and predictable routing. It also created a structural weakness. By funnelling the country’s international traffic through a narrow geographic corridor, Nigeria’s entire digital economy became dependent on a single coastal zone.

“We had six or seven cables landing in Lagos,” Abayomi Adebanjo, Director, Legal at MainOne, an Equinix company, told TechCabal. “That was a choke point and a single point of failure.”

That weakness became impossible to ignore in March 2024, when an underwater landslide off the coast of Côte d’Ivoire severed multiple major cables, including ACE, MainOne, SAT-3 and WACS. Because these systems follow similar seabed paths on their approach to Lagos, a single geological event disrupted connectivity across West Africa, exposing the risks of overconcentration at one landing hub.

Wole Abu, CEO of Equinix West Africa, frames the problem in both technical and human terms. “We’ve diversified the risk of a single point of failure in Lagos,” he said. “In the event of any disruption, natural disasters, infrastructure damage, the nation now has an independent pathway for critical international communications. That is a peerless value.”

But resilience is only one dimension. The Lagos concentration also created what engineers call the “trombone effect”: traffic travelling unnecessarily long distances before returning to its origin.

“If you’ve ever lived outside Lagos, you will notice there’s no way you have the same internet experience,” Abu said. “You send a message from Port Harcourt, it goes to Lagos, maybe to California, then comes back to Lagos and then to Port Harcourt. That added latency is physical. You feel it.”

From cable to ecosystem

Landing a cable is only the first step. The 2Africa system, which spans 45,000 kilometres and has a design capacity of up to 180 terabits per second, is one of the longest subsea systems in the world. It uses a newer fibre-optic technology that allows twice as many channels to run through the cable compared to older ones.

But capacity in the ocean is meaningless without infrastructure on land.

Adebanjo explained that after the cable landed in 2024, Equiniximmediately began building what he calls the “layers” required to transform it into a functional gateway.

First came the modular cable landing station in Akwa Ibom, where the subsea cable physically terminates. Then came the middle mile: approximately 250 kilometres of new terrestrial fibre linking the landing station to Port Harcourt, traversing multiple states. Additional metro fibre networks were deployed within Akwa Ibom and Rivers State to distribute capacity locally.

Finally, Equinix completed PR1, a carrier-neutral data centre in Port Harcourt.

“If you couple all three together, data centre, terrestrial backhaul, metro, you’ve essentially built a new digital gateway in the South-South,” Adebanjo said.

PR1 is a one-megawatt facility, expandable over time. It has been ready for service since December and is already onboarding customers. 

According to Abu, at least one major global technology company began deploying infrastructure there even before completion.

“Is it completed? Yes. Is it live? Yes,” he said. “Customers are coming in.”

The $140 million investment figure previously associated with the project refers not just to PR1 but to a broader portfolio of Nigerian projects, including expansions and infrastructure hardening in Lagos.

Why the South-South?

The decision to land in Akwa Ibom was not arbitrary.

“We chose Akwa Ibom for a reason,” Adebanjo said. “It was business-friendly and could accommodate a submarine landing.”

Beyond regulatory openness, the region makes strategic sense. The South-South is densely populated (approximately 32 million people) and economically significant, home to oil and gas infrastructure and a growing base of enterprises and consumers.

Demographics were part of the calculus. Nigeria’s youthful population is consuming increasing amounts of digital content. Meeting that demand closer to where users live improves productivity and experience.

“Access means access for everybody, enterprises, network service providers, consumers,” Adebanjo said. “The magnitude of impact on the macro environment is huge.”

Equinix’s role is that of an interconnector. It does not own the 2Africa cable; that belongs to a consortium including Meta, Vodafone and others. Instead, Equinix provides the landing facilities, middle-mile fibre and data centres that allow network operators, cloud providers and enterprises to plug into that capacity.

Following its $320 million acquisition of MainOne in 2022, Equinix became a central facilitator of subsea connectivity in West Africa.

Navigating complexities

Building a second gateway in Nigeria’s South-South is not straightforward. The cable route had to cross multiple oil and gas pipelines, 18 in total, representing roughly 30% of Nigeria’s oil volumes.

“You can’t come and destroy pipelines because you want to give us internet,” Abu said. “There was an extra layer of care and commitment just to land in that part of the country.”

The terrestrial fibre crosses three states, requiring coordination with federal and state authorities, maritime agencies and security services. According to Adebanjo, the company secured right-of-way approvals and permits in both Akwa Ibom and Rivers State with relative efficiency.

“In our experience, the South-South has been stellar in terms of permits and licences,” he said.

Security, however, remains a challenge. Cable cuts and theft are persistent issues in Nigeria. Equinix has relied on security agencies and consultants to protect its infrastructure and has worked with authorities to arrest suspected cable thieves.

Abu argued that digital infrastructure should receive stronger critical national infrastructure protection. “CNI should not be lip service,” he said. “It should be executed.”

Beyond resilience and latency, cost is a central motivation.

When all international capacity is concentrated in Lagos, operators in other regions must pay to backhaul traffic over long distances. That middle-mile cost inflates the price of connectivity for enterprises and consumers.

By creating a second entry and exit point in the South-South, Equinix aims to reduce those backhaul costs and stimulate local interconnection.

The PR1 data centre functions as what Abu described as a local “internet exchange” environment. Networks, cloud providers and content delivery networks can interconnect directly, keeping traffic local rather than routing it through Lagos or overseas.

“That keeps the traffic local, reducing cost,” he said. “What Lagos has enjoyed for maybe 20 years, that region is positioned to start enjoying now.”

The gateway also enables disaster recovery strategies. Businesses can mirror operations between Lagos and Port Harcourt, creating redundancy at a national scale.

“You can implement disaster recovery strategies at a different scale,” Abu said. “Use PR1 as backup and vice versa.”

Equinix’s global play

Equinix operates in more than 70 markets globally. Nearly 90% of internet traffic passes through its facilities somewhere along the chain, according to Abu. While the company is not consumer-facing, it sits at the foundation of digital ecosystems.

“What we’re doing in Nigeria aligns with Equinix’s global ambition to be where opportunity connects,” Abu said.

In the age of distributed artificial intelligence (AI) and hybrid cloud architectures, proximity, latency and data sovereignty matter more than ever. Enterprises must balance compliance requirements, cost pressures and performance.

“The solution from Equinix solves latency. It is sovereign by design because the physical facility is sitting here,” he said.

For Nigeria, the expansion into the South-South represents not just redundancy but integration into a global fabric of interconnection.

“If you colocate in Port Harcourt, you can go to Perth, Sydney, Japan,” Abu said. “Every data centre is a global node.”

At its core, Equinix frames its strategy around a simple mandate: shorten the path to connectivity. By creating a second digital anchor in the South-South, Equinix reduces the physical distance data must travel, improves speed and reliability for millions of users, and provides an alternate route that keeps the country online when Lagos is disrupted.

“We’re creating faster, simpler access to digital infrastructure,” Adebanjo said. “We’re not building data centres in isolation. We’re building platforms to host and interconnect every fabric of the digital ecosystem.”

The new platforms, backed by submarine cables and resilient fibre, boost productivity and creativity. Businesses can move work to the cloud, banks and fintechs face fewer disruptions, and services like telemedicine and online learning reach beyond Lagos. Manufacturers and oil and gas companies gain reliable bandwidth, while creative industries can handle large files easily. For households, smoother connections improve streaming, remote work, and online shopping.

The South-South has long been seen primarily through the lens of oil and gas. Equinix is betting it can become something else: a digital anchor balancing Lagos and supporting Nigeria’s broader connectivity ambitions.