The Minister for Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr Bosun Tijani has announced strategic partnerships with Cisco, 21st Century Technologies like Awarri and DataDotOrg.
Tijani made the announcements while speaking at a dinner to mark the end of a four-day National Artificial Intelligence Strategy (NAIS) Workshop in Abuja.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the workshop was themed: “Developing the High-Level Strategy and Implementation Plan for a National Artificial Intelligence Strategy for Nigeria”.
He informed that the partnerships would drive technological innovation and boost Nigeria’s digital Economy.
Tijani said that the workshop was to formulate a strategy focused on addressing the needs of Nigerian citizens and communities.
He noted the increased attention on AI across the world and growth in investments in the technology in Nigeria saying: “Over one Petabyte of storage is already being allocated to AI projects in Nigeria by Galaxy Backbone Limited.
“The Pilot Compute Programme that we are undertaking, which is seeing 21st Century Technologies invest over 2 million dollars in Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).
“It is also going to put us in a position to start building and narrating the story for why we need to invest in our computing power as a nation.
“We all know that the strength of a network is determined by the value that each node on the network brings to it.
“If our world is truly connected, you are not helping Africa or Nigeria by ensuring that we can come to the table and participate.
“By partnering with us, you are only ensuring that our world is stronger because we have something significant to contribute to the network.”
The minister outlined a number of strategic partnerships and projects facilitated by the Ministry to fast-track Nigeria’s growth in the field of AI.
He listed them to include the National Centre for Al and Robotics (NCAIR) relaunch, Nigerian multilingual large language model, Nigeria’s computing infrastructure pilot and the AI collective, accordingly.