Four global technology firms have formed a joint venture, AfricAI, to advance Africa’s artificial intelligence sovereignty and strengthen regional digital infrastructure, with Nigeria serving as the flagship launch market.

The partnership — involving Lakeba Group (Australia), Next Digital (Nigeria), AqlanX (UAE), and Agentic Dynamic (Netherlands) — was sealed through a Memorandum of Understanding signed on Monday. AfricAI will focus on developing and commercialising enterprise-grade AI solutions tailored for African needs.

According to the partners, the venture will deploy localised AI in healthcare, digital identity, document automation, public administration, and enterprise services while ensuring that workloads are hosted and governed within African data infrastructure. “We are bringing together four complementary pillars—global IP, regional expertise, deployment excellence, and next-gen agentic AI architecture—to create an AI foundation that reflects African realities,” the founding partners said.

AfricAI’s immediate plan is to leverage Nigeria’s data centres and edge infrastructure, with expansion into Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Rwanda projected by 2026. The venture also aims to train over 100 regional AI professionals and set up a Center of Excellence to develop talent in cybersecurity, ethical AI deployment and model tuning.

Its roadmap includes sovereign AI for identity verification, knowledge automation for public registries, agentic AI assistants for education and policymaking and multilingual health and citizen service platforms in Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Pidgin.

Highlighting the strategic vision, Prince Malik Ado-Ibrahim, Chairman of Next Digital, said: “At Next Digital, we’re not just deploying AI — we’re 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.”

Giuseppe Porcelli, founder and CEO of Lakeba Group, emphasised Nigeria’s role as a launchpad: “Lakeba has 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.”

Demetrio Russo, founder and CEO of AqlanX, described AfricAI as a boost to Africa’s digital sovereignty agenda.

“Localization, 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,” Russo said.

Eren Sivasli, Chairman of Agentic Dynamic, said the venture would bring scalable automation to African markets.

“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,” said Sivasli.