Digital Parks Africa (DPA), the data centre business linked to Master Power Technologies Group, is pushing into West Africa with plans for a new carrier-neutral facility in Lagos. The company unveiled the project, Nigeria Data Centre 1 (NDC1), at ITW Africa in Kenya.
A Long History, A New Chapter
DPA’s move into Lagos is not exactly a cold start. Master Power Technologies Group has operated in Nigeria since 2001, giving the company a level of familiarity with the market that newer entrants may lack. NDC1 essentially extends that existing power and technical expertise into full data centre services, rather than starting from scratch.
Founder and CEO Menno Parsons framed the Lagos investment as part of a longer-term regional strategy, describing it as building on DPA’s existing commitment to Nigeria and its broader plans across the African digital economy.
Who NDC1 Is Built For
The facility is designed with a fairly clear target audience: banks and other financial institutions, cloud providers, connectivity companies, and general businesses that need resilient, always-on infrastructure close to home. As a carrier-neutral facility, NDC1 is meant to give these customers more flexibility in how they connect, scale, and deliver services, rather than locking them into a single network provider.
That positioning matters in a market like Nigeria, where demand for cloud services, digital payments, fintech platforms, and data-intensive operations has been climbing steadily. More local capacity means shorter distances between data and the businesses that rely on it, which typically translates to better performance and fewer points of failure.
Betting On Certification And Standards
DPA appears keen to signal seriousness about build quality. The company has engaged the Uptime Institute to carry out a Tier IV Certification of Constructed Facility assessment for NDC1, one of the more rigorous benchmarks in the data centre industry. Tarik Bahanniss, the Uptime Institute’s Managing Director and Vice President for Africa, took part in a ceremonial signing alongside Parsons to mark the engagement.
Tier IV certification, if achieved, would place NDC1 among the more fault-tolerant facilities on the continent, built to keep running even if individual components fail.
Joining A Crowded Field
Lagos remains Nigeria’s dominant data centre hub, and DPA is not the only company chasing that opportunity. NDC1 adds another name to a growing list of existing and planned facilities in the region, at a time when analysts point to rising cloud adoption, digital payments growth, and even early AI workloads as key drivers of demand. Regulatory pressure pushing companies toward local data hosting is also playing a role in shaping this competition.
Whether DPA’s decades-long presence in Nigeria gives it an edge over newer entrants may become clearer once more details on NDC1’s capacity and timeline emerge. For now, the announcement signals that West Africa’s data centre race is still very much heating up.
