Economic impact
Founded MainOne Cable Company in Lagos in 2008; in 2010 the company completed and activated a 7,000-kilometre submarine fibre-optic cable system connecting West Africa to Europe at a cost of approximately US$240 million, with an initial transmission capacity of 1.92 terabits per second. MainOne subsequently built one of Nigeria's first carrier-neutral data centres (MDX-i) in Lagos, and expanded data centre operations to Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. Equinix, the U.S. data centre operator, acquired MainOne for approximately US$320 million in January 2022, the largest data-infrastructure acquisition in West African history at that date. The transaction established Equinix's first African presence and validated West Africa as a commercial data-centre market.