Digital Parks Africa says it will build a carrier-neutral data centre in Lagos, Nigeria, its first outside South Africa. The announcement gives no capacity, investment figure, site, or date, and its only specific claim is a certification the company has not yet earned anywhere.
Nigeria Data Centre 1, or NDC1, was announced at ITW Africa in Nairobi, Kenya on 8 September 2026. Digital Parks Africa describes itself as the data centre business associated with the Master Power Technologies Group, whose presence in Nigeria dates to 2001, and presents NDC1 as an extension from power and technical work into data centre services.
Menno Parsons, founder and chief executive, said the investment “is much more than a new facility” and reflects “our longstanding commitment to the region”. The release names financial institutions, banks, cloud providers and connectivity providers as the intended customers.
What the announcement does not contain
The announcement includes no figure for IT load in megawatts, no rack or floor-space count, no capital cost, no named site within Lagos, no completion date, and no carrier named on a facility whose selling point is carrier neutrality. On the numbers, it is an announcement of intent.
That makes 4 in a quarter. MTN’s data centre joint venture in August disclosed no capital, capacity or timeline.
A South African consortium including Digital Parks Africa claimed 400 NVIDIA GPUs made Africa’s most powerful AI cloud, a claim that did not survive examination. Vodafone and Cassava announced Egypt’s first national AI factory this week without a GPU count, a site or a date.
The Tier IV claim, and what it actually says
The release says Digital Parks Africa “engaged with Uptime Institute for the Tier IV Certification of Constructed facility assessment”, marked by a ceremonial signing with Tarik Bahanniss, managing director and vice president for Africa at Uptime Institute.
Read carefully: that is an engagement for an assessment, not an award. The distinction matters more than it looks, because Uptime issues 2 separate certifications, and most projects stop in the gap between them.
A Tier Certification of Design Documents assesses drawings. A Tier Certification of Constructed Facility assesses the building after it is built, under live demonstration.
Uptime’s published award list for Nigeria shows 15 facilities holding design certificates and only 5 that have completed the constructed-facility step. Exactly one of those 5 is Tier IV: Galaxy Backbone’s data centre in Kano, a government facility.
No data centre in Lagos holds a Tier IV Constructed Facility certification. The commercial colocation sites that have completed constructed certification there, including Rack Centre, MainOne’s Lekki facility and MTN’s Dabengwa data centre, are Tier III.
The company’s own record
Digital Parks Africa’s existing facility at Samrand, north of Johannesburg, appears on Uptime’s South African list with a Tier III Certification of Design Documents. We reported it as a Tier III site when it opened in 2023. It does not appear on the constructed-facility list at any tier.
So the company is pursuing the harder certification, one tier above anything it has certified before, in a market it has not built in. That is an ambitious target rather than a dishonest one, and the release does not claim otherwise. But a reader skimming it will take away the words Tier IV, and the accurate reading today is that an assessment has been commissioned.
The disclosures that would make this assessable are the ordinary ones: a site, an IT load in megawatts, a commissioning date, and in due course whether the constructed-facility certification is awarded. Until then, the useful fact is the one Uptime’s own list supplies: in 25 years of Nigerian data centre building, one facility has achieved what NDC1 is aiming at.
Leave a Reply