By Hamza Faisal
South African infrastructure investor INFRAGORA Global Capital plans to build two artificial intelligence-ready data centres in Nigeria, in a project estimated to cost between $650 million and $1 billion. The facilities, in Lagos and Delta State, would rank among the largest planned data centre investments Nigeria has ever seen, and they are the first phase of a continent-wide build-out the firm values at $3 billion to $5 billion.
Construction is targeted to begin in the second and third quarters of 2027. The project is in the final stages of detailed assessment and design, with financial close expected before ground is broken, Kiel Odiogo, INFRAGORA's senior managing director, told TechCabal. The company has not disclosed how much funding it has secured or named its backers, citing confidentiality, but Odiogo said the project has attracted support from regional and international institutional investors.
Two sites, 100 megawatts of AI capacity
The primary facility will be built in Lagos as a Tier IV, AI-ready and cloud-enabled data centre, while the second site in Delta State is expected to serve as a Tier III or Tier IV redundancy and disaster-recovery facility with similar cloud and computing capabilities. Together, the centres are designed to start at a combined 60 to 70 megawatts of capacity, expandable to 100 megawatts, housing thousands of traditional server racks and hundreds of high-density GPU racks for advanced AI workloads.
The United States Trade and Development Agency is funding a $1.87 million feasibility study for the project, under an agreement signed with INFRAGORA in September 2026. The study will carry out technical and financial assessments of the facilities, including their capacity to support AI workloads. USTDA estimates Nigeria's data centre market is expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 14.2 percent and could reach 226.7 megawatts by 2029.
Power is the make-or-break question
Reliable electricity is the biggest operating challenge for data centres in Nigeria, and INFRAGORA plans to tackle it head-on. The firm intends to develop a 160 to 200 megawatt independent power plant alongside the data centres, combining gas and renewable energy with battery storage, sourced through Ocha Energy, its sister energy platform, and backed by long-term power purchase agreements.
"INFRAGORA's strategy is to have independent power deployment accompanying each AFRIDATA project roll-out across the continent under the Ocha green energy platform," Odiogo said. "This will be supported by a robust battery storage backbone."
A $5 billion continental platform
Nigeria is only the starting point. Under its AFRIDATA platform, INFRAGORA plans to develop a further 300 to 550 megawatts of data centre capacity across Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Tanzania, Angola, South Africa and Egypt, at an estimated total cost of $3 billion to more than $5 billion.
The announcement lands as Nigeria's data centre market heats up: Kasi Cloud is already developing a 100-megawatt facility in Lagos backed by an estimated $250 million in initial capitalisation. For INFRAGORA, the bet is that Africa's demand for local compute — for AI, cloud services and enterprise workloads — will keep outrunning supply, and that whoever solves the power problem first will own the market.
