Uche Henry
Microsoft said it has concluded plans to spend over $100 million over the next five years to open its first development centre in Africa to work with local partners, governments, and also hire engineering talents.
A statement from Nigeria Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC) in tracking investments in Nigeria said the sites would be in Nairobi and Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub.
The statement reveals that the tech giant plans to hire full-time developers at the two sites by the end of 2019 and expand it to 500 by the end of 2023, Microsoft said in a statement published by Bloomberg.
The company plans to use the sites to recruit African engineers to work in areas such as cloud services, which use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and applications for mixed reality where customers use goggles to project 3-D images onto the real world.
Cloud Tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Huawei are jostling for the African market and plan to take advantage of growing telecommunications infrastructure and work in areas like e-commerce and mobile payments.
“Microsoft has been partnering with and looking for cloud customers in Africa where it opened data centres in South Africa. The company said it is working with Nigerian and Kenyan companies in areas like fintech, energy, and agriculture.
Cloud rival, Amazon, is also opening a data center in Africa next year.
Meanwhile, NIPC said it tracked investments in Nigeria worth $12.71 billion in the first quarter of 2019 in furtherance to reach its mandate. According to the agency, a total of 24 projects across eight states were announced from investors in 12 countries. Comparatively, the investments announced for Q1 2019 were 57 per cent less than the size announced in the same quarter 2018. This was probably due to the national elections that took place in Q1 2019, among other factors. The major announcements were from Royal Dutch Shell Plc with $10 billion in crude exploration, Moroccan OCP Group’s plan to build a $1.5 billion ammonia plant and the Joint Venture contract between Malaysian partners and Nigerian oil company, First Exploration & Petroleum Development Company Ltd worth $901.79 million for the exploration of crude oil.