INFRAGORA Global Capital, a South African infrastructure investment firm, plans to start building two AI-ready data centres in Nigeria in the second quarter of 2027, at a cost of $650 million to $1 billion, Techeconomy reported on 26 October. Financial close is expected before construction begins.
What is planned
The project is called AFRIDATA Nigeria and is owned by AFRIDATA Datacenter Nigeria Ltd, a special-purpose company incorporated in April 2026 and backed by INFRAGORA, institutional investors and a strategic data-centre operator, according to Economic Confidential's report on the US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) grant. The main facility would be a Tier IV, AI-ready data centre in Lagos, with a Tier III or IV backup and disaster-recovery site in Delta State. It would lease computing, cloud and colocation capacity to banks, telecoms firms, cloud providers and other institutions.
Power is the core of the plan. INFRAGORA intends to build a 160 to 200MW independent power plant combining gas and renewables with battery storage, run by its sister energy platform, Ocha Energy, and could sell excess power to other providers or the grid, according to Techeconomy. The reports differ on the size of the data centres: Techeconomy puts initial capacity at 80 to 100MW, while the USTDA material describes 60 to 70MW, expandable to 100MW.
"Independent power deployment accompanying each AFRIDATA project roll-out" is the strategy, senior managing director Kiel Odiogo told Techeconomy. The firm also plans an AFRIDATA Academy to combine AI training with job placement and startup support.
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The firm money on the table is for planning. USTDA awarded a $1.87 million grant for a feasibility study of the project's technical and commercial viability, and invited US firms to bid by 13 October. INFRAGORA did not name its investors, citing confidentiality, and has not disclosed GPU capacity, electricity tariffs, the renewable share of the power mix or operating costs.
USTDA estimates that Nigeria's data-centre market is growing at 14.2% a year and could reach 226.7MW by 2029, and that Africa has under 2% of the world's data-centre capacity. Nigeria is the first phase of a wider AFRIDATA plan covering Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Tanzania, Angola, South Africa and Egypt, which would need $3 billion to $5 billion.
