$650m to $1bn for 2 AI data centres: INFRAGORA's Nigeria plan comes with its own 200MW power plant

A South African investor wants to spend between $650m and $1bn on 2 AI-ready data centres in Nigeria, and it's building its own power plant to keep them running.

INFRAGORA Global Capital, which runs the project through its AFRIDATA platform, says groundbreaking should come by Q2 2027, once financial close is done. The sites are in Lagos and Delta states, according to the US Trade and Development Agency, which is paying for the feasibility study. Senior managing director Kiel Odiogo said on Monday the sites are now in final detailed assessment and design.

The power plan is the real story

Anyone who has run a server room in Lagos knows the grid is the weak link. INFRAGORA's answer is a 160MW to 200MW independent plant mixing gas and renewables, backed by batteries and sourced through sister platform Ocha Energy. It's meant to carry the data centres' first 80MW to 100MW of load. That's 2x cover at both ends of the range (STATART calculation), and the company says spare power could be sold to other infrastructure firms, energy traders or the grid.

On cost, the plan works out to roughly $6.5m to $12.5m per MW of initial load (STATART calculation). For a sense of scale, Kasi Cloud's 100MW Lagos facility carries about $250m in initial capitalisation. That isn't a like-for-like comparison, since INFRAGORA's figure folds in power generation, but it shows how heavy this bet is.

Who's paying is still a blank

Here's the catch. INFRAGORA hasn't named its investors or said how much money is actually in the bank. "We cannot disclose specific funding secured due to confidentiality obligations," Odiogo said. The tariff for the power, the renewable share of the mix and the GPU capacity are also undisclosed.

The firm is aiming at Tier III+ and Tier IV standards and plans to sell wholesale computing, cloud and disaster recovery services to Nigerian data centre operators, enterprises, small businesses and international cloud providers. Nigeria is the anchor for a bigger AFRIDATA rollout, priced at $3bn to more than $5bn, with another 300MW to 550MW planned across Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Tanzania, Angola, South Africa and Egypt.

For Lagos fintechs and other firms that need AI-grade computing, more local capacity would be welcome. Until INFRAGORA names its backers and reaches financial close, treat this as a well-drawn plan rather than a done deal, and watch for that close before the Q2 2027 groundbreaking date.