The Grantee invites submission of qualifications and proposal data (collectively referred to as the “Proposal”) from interested U.S. firms that are qualified on the basis of experience and capability to execute a feasibility study (“Study”) that would support the development of two data centers, with a combined 60-70 megawatts (MW) of capacity with room for expansion to a combined target capacity of 100MW, in the states of Lagos and Delta (the “Project”) located in the Federal Republic of Nigeria (the “Host Country”). The Proposal submission deadline is October 13, 2026 at 6 p.m. Eastern [October 14, 2026 at 12 a.m. SAST.] The U.S. firm selected will be paid in U.S. dollars from a $1,870,000 grant to the Grantee from the U.S. Trade and Development Agency.
Project Background
Infragora Global Capital (Pty) Ltd (“Infragora”) has begun efforts to develop a series of open access data centers across the African continent, which it refers to as the “AFRIDATA Datacenter Platform” (or “Platform”). Nigeria is the country of initial focus for the Platform as its data center market has a compound annual growth rate of 14.20 percent and is poised to reach 226.7 MW by 2029. Infragora plans to develop two data centers in Nigeria: the primary in Lagos state and the secondary in Delta state. The Lagos state data center will have AI-ready and cloud enabled capacity with Tier IV certification. The secondary data center will provide the required redundancy as either a Tier III or Tier IV facility and act as a disaster recovery site with similar compute and cloud capabilities. The data centers will be owned and operated by a special purpose vehicle (“SPV”) company called “AFRIDATA DATACENTER NIGERIA Ltd.” (“AFRIDATA NIGERIA”) owned by Infragora, institutional and private equity investors, and an experienced data center operator as a strategic partner. The new data center facilities will be commercialized primarily through a full AI compute stack, cloud, and colocation model, allowing customers such as cloud service providers, banks, and mobile network operators to lease rack space for AI workload and cloud infrastructure services. The data centers are planned to have a combined 60-70 MWs of total capacity, with space for 3,600 10 kilowatt (“kW”) traditional server racks for central processing unit (“CPU”) servers and 480 50 kW server racks capable of handling GPU servers needed for AI workloads in an optimized mix.
About the Grantee
Infragora is a South-Africa based infrastructure investment firm that was founded in 2023. Infragora incorporated the AFRIDATA DATACENTER NIGERIA SPV in April 2026 and is planning for AFRIDATA SPVs in Angola, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa with Infragora offices in United Kingdom and the United States. The firm’s primary objective is to establish a secondary market platform for the African infrastructure market, and its core capabilities are project development, deal advisory, capital raise, and fund management. Infragora is one of the majority owners of the SPV, which will own and operate the new data centers. Infragora’s leaders have held senior executive roles at some of Africa’s leading international and development finance institutions such as the African Development Bank, Islamic Development Bank, McKinsey, UBS, DBSA, and the African Finance Corporation. The executives also hold non-executive director positions at MTN Nigeria and British International Investment.
About the Study
The USTDA-funded Study would assess the commercial and technical feasibility of deploying 60-70 MW of combined data center capacity in Nigeria for two data centers with room for expansion to a combined target capacity of 100MW. Specifically, the Study would support Infragora in selecting the most technically and commercially advantageous strategy for developing and commercializing new data center capacity in Nigeria as the initial phase of the continent-wide AFRIDATA Datacenter Platform rollout. The Study would be designed to assess the project’s bankability, assess product-market fit, assist Infragora with identifying U.S. vendors capable of effectively delivering the project, mitigate regulatory risks, and assess requirements for unlocking implementation financing.