In Africa According to a joint statement, AfricAI will immediately focus on Nigeria as its flagship market, leveraging existing national data centers and edge infrastructure to deliver impactful AI applications in healthcare and other sectors.Tech firms, Lakeba Group (Australia), Next Digital (Nigeria), AqlanX (UAE), and Agentic Dynamic (Netherlands) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to establish a Joint Venture named AfricAI.
AfricAI, a landmark initiative to advance Africa’s AI sovereignty and regional digital infrastructure, is focused on localising, deploying, and commercializing enterprise-grade AI solutions tailored to African markets.According to a joint statement, AfricAI will immediately focus on Nigeria as its flagship market, leveraging existing national data centers and edge infrastructure to deliver impactful AI applications in healthcare, digital identity, document automation, public administration, and enterprise services.The joint venture aims to position Africa as an active developer of sovereign, inclusive, and context-aware AI ecosystems built locally, for local needs.“We are bringing together four complementary pillarsglobal IP, regional expertise, deployment excellence, and next-gen agentic AI architectureto create an AI foundation that reflects African realities,” said the founding partners in the statement.They said AfricAI’s mission was not outsourcing AI to Africa but developing it within Africa, by Africa, for Africa.
AfricAI envisions the development of a distributed, interoperable AI network across Africa. With localised applications in agriculture, urban planning, public services, and education, AfricAI seeks to empower African governments, enterprises, and communities with trusted, transparent AI infrastructure,” they added.
By 2026, the JV plans to expand into Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Rwanda and train over 100 regional AI professionals while firmly establishing data, deployment, and decision-making on the continent.The strategic partnership objectives include developing and deploying sovereign AI applications tailored to local market needs in areas such as digital identity, document automation, healthcare, education, and enterprise services.The joint venture is also expected to integrate modular, agent-based AI architecture to enable adaptive and explainable AI across sectors like human resources, CRM, legal, and public policy.It will leverage existing Nigerian edge and cloud infrastructure to ensure AI workloads are hosted, processed, and governed locally, in alignment with national data residency requirements.According to the statement, it will also establish a Centre of Excellence (CoE) to cultivate a regional talent pipeline in AI development, cybersecurity, model tuning, and ethical deployment.Advertisement“AfricAI will prioritise the design and deployment of scalable AI solutions that address national development goals and market opportunities. Initial deployments include sovereign AI for identity and compliance, document intelligence and knowledge automation, agentic AI assistants, and multilingual health and citizen services.The Chairman of Next Digital, Prince Malik Ado-Ibrahim, said the firm was not just deploying AI but shaping it to reflect “who we are as Nigerians and Africans”.
“AfricAI is about more than software. It’s about exporting our intelligence, building our future on our terms, and making Africa a force in the global AI conversation. Nigeria will lead that movement — and we are ready,” Ado-Ibrahim added.The CEO of Lakeba Group, Giuseppe Porcelli, said Lakeba had long been at the forefront of global AI innovation.“AfricAI marks a bold next step not just for Lakeba, but for the future of sovereign AI. Nigeria offers the ideal launchpad for building a truly African AI ecosystem. With our flagship DoxAI platform and deep capabilities in cybersecurity, automation, and orchestration, we are proud to architect the AI infrastructure Africa needs and deserves,” Porcelli noted.According to the Founder and CEO of AqlanX, Demetrio Russo, localisation, multilingual compliance, and digital trust are core to our AI philosophy.“AfricAI reflects a strategic intent by AqlanX to help shape Africa’s digital sovereignty agenda while enabling secure, AI-first innovation ecosystems built for scale, ethics, and inclusion,” said Russo.The Chairman of Agentic Dynamic, Eren Sivasli, said the firm was excited about its contribution to the project.Sivasli said, “We believe in scalable, domain-specific automation that truly supports human workflows. That’s why we’re excited to bring Agentic Dynamic’s segment-oriented agent architecture into this multinational collaboration.”
