Nigeria officially entered the global AI race on Tuesday with the launch of Africa AI Hub, the country's first sovereign artificial intelligence research laboratory, in Abuja.
The $50 million facility is jointly funded by the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation & Digital Economy and a consortium of private partners including MainOne, MTN, Flutterwave and a sovereign-wealth co-investor.
What The Lab Will Do
- Train foundation models on African languages — Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Pidgin and Swahili.
- Provide GPU compute access to local researchers and startups.
- Run a fellowship programme placing 200 Nigerian engineers annually.
- Collaborate with leading research institutions in the US, UK and France.
"Africa cannot afford to be a passive consumer of AI," said the Minister of Communications. "We must build models in our own languages, on our own data, for our own contexts."
The lab's first project — codenamed Naijabrain — is a multilingual large language model targeting 100 billion parameters and trained on over 200 million pages of African-origin text.
Initial benchmarks will be published in Q3, with open-source release of base models pencilled in for early 2027.
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