Nigeria to receive $1 Billion Investment to build two AI-focused Data centres by South African infrastructure investors, to be completed by Q2 2027 at the latest. The investment is pegged at somewhere between $650 million and $1 billion.
Kiel Odiogo, who holds the title of senior managing director at the firm, said in an emailed reply to TechCabal that the planned facilities form part of its AFRIDATA platform for data centres. He said the detailed design and assessment phase is nearly complete, and that financial close has to happen before building can start.
Among the biggest data-centre investments put forward for Nigeria, the two sites reflect rising demand for the computing capacity that AI, corporate data processing and cloud services of various kinds depend on. Kasi Cloud is also developing a 100-megawatt facility, with initial funding of roughly $250 million behind it.
INFRAGORA's Nigerian project is presented as the flagship development of a pan-African platform valued at somewhere between $3 billion and over $5 billion. The firm plans to build a further 300MW to 550MW of data centre capacity in several other markets, among them Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Tanzania, Angola, South Africa and Egypt.
The company, though, has neither disclosed the amount of funding it has lined up nor identified who is providing it. All it would say is that institutional investors, from the region and further afield, have given the project their commitments and support.
Odiogo declined to give details of the funding already secured, citing confidentiality obligations, but said the raising of capital was progressing as planned. “We cannot disclose specific funding secured due to confidentiality obligations,” he said.
Odiogo reports that the US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) is paying for a feasibility study on the project, which will examine the facilities from both a technical and a financial standpoint, among other things, judging whether they could handle AI workloads.
The agency also expects its support to open the Nigerian market to US technology companies that provide cybersecurity solutions, networking equipment, computing hardware, cloud infrastructure and AI software.
Investment in dependable and affordable power
Funding aside, whether the project proves commercially viable will rest largely on access to electricity that is both dependable and affordable.
INFRAGORA further plans a self-contained power station with a capacity of 160–200 megawatts, fuelled by gas and renewable sources and paired with battery storage. The electricity would be supplied by Ocha Energy, a sister company that concentrates on energy, and the company hopes to hold down costs through power purchase agreements signed for the long term.
“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.”
The power station is intended to supply the first 80–100MW of the data centres' capacity, and should there be spare electricity, it could be offered, where practicable, to other infrastructure operators, energy traders and the country's electricity grid.
INFRAGORA believes that tying power generation to its data centre build-out will make supply more dependable and let it quote customers keen prices. Still, it has said nothing about what the electricity will cost, how much of the energy mix will be renewable, or when the power plant will be built.
The firm plans to present the sites as bulk infrastructure underpinning the country's digital economy. Offerings such as compute, cloud hosting and recovery in the event of disaster would be sold to domestic data centre firms, companies, public bodies, smaller businesses and global cloud operators.
“Current estimates suggest that 55% of African enterprises now run at least half of their workloads in the cloud,” Odiogo said. “The trend for African firms is adopting a sovereign-first hybrid approach from the outset – keeping sensitive data in local data centre facilities while using public clouds for elastic workloads.”
The firm says the sites will be constructed to satisfy Tier III+/IV specifications, a grade that points to dependable operation, backup capacity and the ability to withstand faults. A Tier III site is designed to allow servicing without interrupting operations, while a Tier IV site goes further on fault tolerance and can withstand the loss of individual items of equipment with no interruption to service.
Such strengths matter greatly for data centres handling AI workloads, which need steady power and cooling. The company, though, has not revealed how much GPU capacity is planned, nor the specifications for storage or the targets set for network performance.
The spending arrives as more businesses turn to AI applications and cloud services that rely on fast data processing. Placing computing infrastructure nearer to users can cut latency and boost how well applications perform in enterprise software, financial services and other industries heavy on data.
USTDA says Africa holds under 2% of the world's data centre capacity, which means that, for some of their needs in computing and storage, businesses depend on infrastructure located outside the continent.
INFRAGORA argues that developing such capacity inside Nigeria will narrow that shortfall and strengthen the country's sovereignty over its data. Odiogo added that African investors, along with backers from financial institutions, would keep full control and ownership of the venture, which would run in accordance with the relevant data-privacy laws and official regulations.
Even so, the project will depend on American technology, which shows that owning the physical facilities does not amount to command over the equipment, the software, and the platforms that run within them.
USTDA's participation is also meant to open up more opportunities for American firms in Africa's expanding AI market. So, whether the project lessens Nigeria's reliance on overseas technology suppliers will hinge in part on which technologies are selected, how access to data is arranged, and how far Nigerian businesses build up capabilities of their own.
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Investment in African skills as well
As well as computing infrastructure, INFRAGORA is planning an ICT campus for businesses and an academy that will teach:
- AI,
- ML and
- cybersecurity.
The AFRIDATA Academy is planned as a pan-African hub of expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), ML and cybersecurity, pairing a school for ICT skills with a centre for startup innovation. Built to meet the demand that the AFRIDATA Datacenter will create, it will train public servants, companies, SMEs (small firms and mid-sized businesses) and aspiring young founders to take up AI and develop locally built applications.
“The AFRIDATA Academy will combine world-class AI training with job-placement pathways and startup support, helping governments and businesses adopt AI while enabling entrepreneurs to develop local solutions for key industries,” Odiogo said.
The firm expects the wider platform to create thousands upon thousands of jobs, both direct and indirect, with women and the young set to gain the most. A planned innovation fund would also back startups building AI tools for farming, health, power and finance.
In Nigeria, the firm says it is partnering with Lagos Business School to roll the AFRIDATA Platform out across Africa. Its wider African programme also involves collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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