The Managing Director of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), Sule Abdulaziz, has pledged to improve bulk power delivery, making it more viable, reliable, and beneficial for Nigerians.

Mr Abdulaziz, who made the pledge in a statement by Ndidi Mbah, TCN’S general manager, public affairs, said that he would also make the transmission network more reliable.

He spoke at the first town hall meeting with TCN staff following his reappointment by President Bola Tinubu to a second five-year term.

He described his reappointment as a call to greater responsibility, as it is directly aligned with the directive and vision of Tinubu under the Renewed Hope Agenda for the power sector.

”That agenda is clear, to implement practical, measurable, and sustainable reforms that will significantly improve power delivery and ensure that the electricity sector becomes viable, reliable, and beneficial to all Nigerians,” he said.

He further said that Nigeria’s transmission network had made measurable, verifiable progress over the past decade.

Mr Abdulaziz added that grid wheeling capacity had increased from about 5,000 megawatts in 2015 to over 8,700 megawatts.

According to him, this expansion has been driven by sustained investments in transmission infrastructure, including the addition of multiple power transformers and the completion of several 330 Kilovolt (kV) and 132 kV projects across the country.

He said that, despite frequent public criticism, TCN had one of the most technically skilled workforces in the power sector, as evidenced by the results it has achieved.

The TCN boss said that, through major donor-funded programmes, including the World Bank Transmission Rehabilitation and Expansion Programme and the African Development Bank transmission projects, the company has significantly strengthened grid capacity across several regions.

He added that the feat was achieved through collaborations with the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the Agence Française de Développement,

”TCN has installed over 82 transformers in 23 months. Notably, 15 units of 300 megavolt-ampere power transformers were deployed across several transmission stations.

”These include Akangba, Lekki, Alagbon, Ikeja West, Osogbo, Ganmo, Jos, Gombe, Kumbotso, Asaba, Oke Aro, Benin, Alaoji, and Katampe, within the second half of 2025 alone.

“We have also successfully inaugurated multiple high-capacity transformers across substations such as Ajah, Egbin, Enugu, Onitsha, Gombe, Kano, Abuja, Jos, and Benin, strengthening transmission capacity and improving grid reliability,” he said.

According to him, the TCN has also improved grid stability through targeted interventions, the rehabilitation of ageing infrastructure, and enhanced maintenance practices.

Mr Abdulaziz said that the company’s protection systems had been strengthened, system disturbances had been reduced, and operational coordination across regions had improved significantly.

He also took the opportunity to commend the management team, union leadership, and staff members for their support, dedication, and collaboration in positioning TCN as a leading transmission company.

He said that the achievements recorded by TCN were not accidental but the result of hard work, dedication, and resilience among staff.

“In this new phase, we intend to go a step further. Our goal is simple: to work together as partners in driving the growth, stability, and success of this company.

”Infrastructure growth must now translate into what matters most to Nigerians: stable, reliable, and consistent bulk supply of electricity that will be delivered to distribution load centres for onward delivery to their customers,” he said.

Earlier, in her welcome address, Mrs Abiodun Fadahunsi, executive director of human resources and corporate services at TCN, said that the meeting was a platform for management to openly engage and share ideas with staff members.

Mrs Fadahunsi said that the initiative reflected management’s commitment to transparency, inclusiveness, and continuous improvement.

“In a critical sector such as power transmission, it is important for the members of staff to remain aligned, informed, and connected to enable them to work as a team to meet evolving industry demands,” she said.

According to her, every employee has a crucial role to play in the company’s success.

Also speaking, the Executive Director, Transmission Service Provider (TSP), Mr Olugbenga Ajiboye, reiterated the need for commitment of all TCN staffers to ensure the administration’s success,

The Executive Director of Finance and Accounts, Mr Chuks Ochije, assured that the management would continue to do everything within its power to ensure workers’ benefits are paid promptly.

(NAN)

Amazon just scored a major coup with Meta thanks, once again, to Amazon’s own homegrown chips. Meta has signed a deal to use millions of AWS Graviton chips to power its growing AI needs, Amazon announced Friday.

Note that the AWS Graviton is an ARM-based CPU, (a central processing unit, the chip that handles general computing tasks) not a GPU (a graphical processing unit).

While GPUs remain the chip of choice for training large models, once those models are trained, AI agents built on top of them are causing a shift in the type of chip is needed. Agents create compute-intensive workloads like real-time reasoning, writing code, search, and the the coordination involved in managing agents through multi-step tasks. AWS’s latest version of Graviton was designed specifically to handle AI-related compute needs, the company says.

This deal brings more of Meta’s cash back to AWS instead of competitors like Google Cloud. Last August, Meta signed a six year, $10 billion deal with Google Cloud, though Meta had, until then, primarily been an AWS customer that also used Microsoft Azure.

We couldn’t help but notice that AWS timed the announcement of this deal right as the Google Cloud Next conference wrapped up, like a virtual smirk at its cloud rival. Google, of course, also makes its own custom AI chips and announced new versions of them at the show.

True, Amazon makes its own AI GPU as well: the Trainium, which, despite its name, is used for both training and inference — the stage that happens after a model is trained, when it’s actively processing prompts.

But Anthropic had already swooped in with a deal announced earlier this month that commandeered many of those chips for years to come. The Claude maker agreed to spend $100 billion over 10 years to run its workloads on AWS — with a particular focus on Trainium — while Amazon agreed to invest another $5 billion (bringing its total to $13 billion of investment) into Anthropic in return.

Ultimately, the Meta deal is allowing Amazon to showcase a huge AI customer as a proving point for its homegrown CPUs. These are chips that compete with Nvidia’s new Vera CPU, which is also ARM-based and designed to handle AI agentic workloads. The difference, of course, is that Nvidia sells its chips and AI systems to enterprises and cloud providers (including AWS). AWS only sells access to its chips through its cloud service.

Earlier this month Amazon CEO Andy Jassy took aim at Nvidia and Intel in his annual shareholder letter, saying that enterprises want better price-performance ratios for AI, and that he intends to win deals on that basis. This also means the pressure couldn’t be higher on Amazon’s internal chip building team to deliver, a team that we visited last month in an exclusive tour of their lab.