Nigeria now ranks 73rd on AI readiness ranking–FG

Federal Government said that Nigeria has climbed 30 places in the Oxford artificial intelligence readiness ranking, from 103rd to 73rd, in two years. Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr Bosun Tijani, said this at the Build 2026 Conference, convened by the Nigeria AI Collective.

He was represented by the National Director of the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR), Dr. Olubunmi Ajala. Ajala, who is also his Technical Adviser on AI, Research and Data, said the gain followed the introduction of the National AI Strategy.

“Two years ago, before this national AI strategy, Nigeria was ranked one zero three. Two years down the line, we are now number 73,” he said. He said the strategy, released a month after the minister took office, set a target for the country. “When you split the people leading AI into four, we should be in the top four. We’re getting close,” he said.

Ajala said an International Monetary Fund (IMF) report released some months ago recognised the work being done. “It recognized very well what we are doing,” he said. He, however, told the gathering that infrastructure remains the main obstacle. “When you look at all of them, there is one part where the challenge remains, and that is the infrastructure,” he said.

On electricity, he said the government plans a data park in Egbe, where about 60 per cent of power capacity is unused. On connectivity, he said: “A high percentage, 20,000,000 of Nigerians are not connected.” Ajala said cloud services and chips pose the greatest difficulty, because chip technology keeps changing and demand from the big cloud providers strains supply. He added that geopolitics matters in deciding where chips come from. “Even if you have all the money, we may not have this chipset,” he said.

He said Nigerian developers still have to host models on foreign platforms, even where they are not calling proprietary models. He thanked Luminate, the Gates Foundation, Amazon Web Services, Google, Meta and Microsoft for their support.

He proposed a way around the shortage of computing power. “What we are proposing is to have a GPU, but this GPU should not only serve all. It’s possible for us to connect our GPU with the GPU again founded by Gates Foundation in Rwanda. Same with Senegal and Kenya. If you want to build a large language model or you want to build something big, Nigerian capacity might not be big enough, but over the night, maybe forty eight hours, we could aggregate this for all of us, and you will be able to do what you want to do,” he said.