BCN and Zadara Launch Africa’s First Neutral Multi-Tenant AI Factory in Nigeria

Backbone Connectivity Network (BCN),  a premier wholesale open access digital service provider and Zadara,  the sovereign AI cloud leader, announced a groundbreaking partnership, formally announced at the recent AfricaCom 2025 conference. Through this collaboration, BCN will launch a Zadara-powered multi-tenant Neutral AI Factory in Nigeria, empowering cloud providers across Africa to modernize their offerings by enabling provisioning of AI clouds that are high-performance, cost-effective, and resilient.

Many cloud providers across Africa are experiencing growing demand for AI services. However, most struggle to afford the large-scale infrastructure investments required to build competitive AI clouds without upfront customer commitments, while customers, in turn, are reluctant to commit before such AI clouds are operational.

To address this “chicken-and-egg” challenge, BCN is launching a Neutral AI Factory powered by Zadara’s multi-tenant platform. Zadara is one of the first NVIDIA design and integration partners to enable multitenancy for high performance scalable NVIDIA AI factories by adhering to NVIDIA reference architecture for multi-tenant AI clouds.

Zadara’s multi-tenancy empowers BCN to provision AI clouds for cloud providers starting from a compact form factor with seamless scalability. This flexible model allows cloud providers to efficiently deploy AI clouds of any size, fulfilling growing AI demand without making significant upfront capital investments.

BCN has long been recognized for its innovation, agility, exceptional service delivery and commitment to customer success. With operations spanning Nigeria and beyond supported by a national wholesale open access integrated fiber connectivity infrastructure, licenses from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), and access to green energy 2GigaWatts cost-efficient energy resources, BCN is uniquely positioned to launch Africa’s first Neutral Multi-Tenant AI Factory.

BCN is supported by the Digital Investment Facility-African Infrastructure Development Association Digital Catapult which is aimed at assisting the speed and success of innovative African digital infrastructure developers such as BCN. The Digital Investment Facility (DIF) is part of the Team Europe

Data Governance in Africa Initiative under the EU Global Gateway Strategy, funded by the European

Commission, Finland and Germany, implemented by GIZ German Development Agency and Haus Finland. AfIDA is the association of leading developers, funds and Development Finance Institutions active across the African continent.

“We congratulate BCN and Zadara on their partnership, and wish them every success in developing state of the art compute to West Africa.”

– Yassin Bendjebbour Team Lead, Digital Investment Facility, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH (GIZ) on behalf of DIF-AfIDA

“Our partnership with Zadara enables us to deliver Africa’s first Neutral AI Factory. Cloud providers across Africa need a trusted partner to supply the AI cloud infrastructure that powers their services. BCN requires multi-tenant AI cloud software capable of provisioning secure, cost-effective, and business-specific AI clouds from our Neutral AI Factory. Together with Zadara, we are making that vision a reality.”

– Ibrahim Dikko, CEO, BCN

“We’re excited to partner with BCN to launch Africa’s first Neutral Multi-Tenant AI Factory. Together, we’re combining BCN’s Neutral Factory, Zadara’s advanced multitenancy software, and NVIDIA’s industry-leading AI platform to help cloud providers across the continent accelerate their transformation into the AI era. This collaboration delivers scalable, secure, and cost-efficient AI that foster innovation and drive digital growth throughout Africa.”

– Yoram Novick, CEO, Zadara