Africa’s First Neutral AI Factory Debuts in Nigeria Through BCN–Zadara Collaboration

BCN and Zadara help cloud providers provision AI-ready clouds to streamline and optimize on-boarding of AI solutions to their customers.

Cape Town, South Africa, November 25, 2025 - Backbone Connectivity Network (BCN), a premier wholesale open access digital service provider and Zadara, the sovereign AI cloud leader, today 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,” said 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,” said Ibrahim Dikko, CEO of BCN. “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.”

“We’re excited to partner with BCN to launch Africa’s first Neutral Multi-Tenant AI Factory,” said Yoram Novick, CEO of Zadara. “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.”

About Backbone Connectivity Network Ltd (BCN) 

Backbone Connectivity Network (BCN) is a premier wholesale open access Digital Service Provider incorporated in 2004 as a pioneer Broadband Fibre Solution and Data Management Company, providing the best of Digital Solutions & Services and Digital Infrastructure, Broadband Connectivity, Internet Transit and Access as well as Cloud and Managed Solutions across various sectors in Nigeria.

BCN stands as Northern Nigeria’s premier digital infrastructure, solutions and services provider, strategically headquartered in Abuja at the heart of the nation’s connectivity landscape. With its robust open-access network and expanding portfolio of advanced digital services, BCN occupies a unique position in enabling transformation across Nigeria, and West Africa. The company’s integrated approach— combining infrastructure excellence with innovative cloud, security, and enterprise solutions—continues to power growth, resilience, and digital inclusion across the region.

About Zadara

Zadara  is a leading provider of sovereign AI edge clouds offering a revolutionary distributed cloud platform that simplifies operational complexity and enables seamless multi-tenancy through automated end-to-end provisioning of compute, storage, and networking.

With over 500 edge cloud locations worldwide and with the ability to deploy a cloud in any location, Zadara’s clouds are uniquely positioned to meet the unique demands of various cloud-based use cases, including sovereign cloud and AI inference at the edge for service providers and the modern enterprise. Zadara clouds are AWS compatible and feature consumption-based pricing with zero data egress fees. Zadara’s fully-managed clouds are designed to accommodate any workload, anywhere – whether onpremises, hybrid, multi-cloud or at the edge. 

Zadara operates worldwide with a highly skilled team that provides 24/7 follow-the-sun support and services. Zadara is headquartered in Irvine, California.