There is a reason the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, better known as CPP Investments, keeps turning up in digital infrastructure deals. Recently, it announced it would purchase, with Equinix, atNorth, a leading Nordic data center operator for $4b. It is doing what large, well-governed pension pools are supposed to do: buying long-duration assets with defensible cash flows, inflation linkage, and rising strategic importance. In an era when data centers, fiber networks and shared wireless systems increasingly look like the toll roads of the digital economy, CPP Investments has treated the sector as core infrastructure, to double down on.
That distinction matters for Africa. Across the continent, governments and regulators still talk about digital infrastructure as something to be financed mainly by foreign capital, development finance institutions or balance-sheet-heavy operators. Yet one of the clearest lessons from Canada is that domestic long-term savings can become a strategic source of capital – if they are professionally governed, patiently managed and allowed to invest through credible market vehicles.
CPP Investments is now one of the world’s largest institutional investors, with net assets of C$780.7 billion as of December 31, 2025, and a 10-year annualized net return of 8.4 percent. Its legal mandate is to maximize returns without undue risk of loss, in the best interests of contributors and beneficiaries. Above election cycles, that arm’s-length structure is the foundation that allows the institution to think in decades..
What CPP Investments has built in digital infrastructure is one of the world’s smartest portfolio architecture. As at March 2024, the fund said it had 29 direct infrastructure investments across 13 countries totaling C$51.8 billion, with significant digital positions including Boldyn Networks, Cellnex and Brazil’s V.Tal. By the end of 2024, its real-assets book stood at C$144.1 billion, giving it the scale to keep compounding exposure where it sees structural demand.
The pattern of deals is even more important. In Brazil, CPP Investments bought a 9.5 percent stake in V.Tal, a fiber network in 2022 for R$2.5 billion, backing what it described as the country’s largest neutral fiber-to-the-home network. In Italy, it agreed in 2024 to acquire 17.5 percent of Telecom Italia’s NetCo for up to €2 billion, joining a consortium building a wholesale fixed-line network meant to serve both urban and rural broadband demand. CPP Investments has also invested in BAI Communications – now Boldyn Networks – since 2009, and in 2022 said it had committed roughly C$3 billion to the business. In March 2024, together with AIMCo and Manulife Investment Management, it increased support again to expand Boldyn’s US platform. The attraction is obvious: dense, recurring-demand infrastructure attached to transit systems, stadiums, campuses and urban networks where connectivity demand rises steadily even when economic cycles wobble.
Then there is data center capacity, where CPP Investments has become steadily more ambitious. In South Korea, it launched a KRW200 billion joint venture with Pacific Asset Management in 2022 to develop the Jukjeon Data Centre, and followed that in 2024 with a second, larger KRW1 trillion venture to develop carrier-neutral hyperscale facilities. In 2024 it also agreed to take a 12 percent stake in AirTrunk as part of Blackstone’s A$24 billion acquisition of the Asia-Pacific data center operator. In early 2025 it signed a joint venture with Equinix and GIC to raise more than US$15 billion for Equinix xScale data centers in the US, with CPP Investments allocating up to US$2.4 billion for a 37.5 percent equity interest. It then added C$225 million in construction financing for a 54MW data center project in Ontario, and in February 2026 agreed with Equinix to acquire atNorth for US$4 billion, with CPP taking 60 percent controlling interest through a US$1.6 billion investment.
Read together, those transactions show five habits African policymakers should pay attention to.
CPP Investments backs platforms, not isolated assets. Fiber is bought as a neutral network. Wireless is bought as a scalable operator. Data centers are built through ventures with industrial partners such as Equinix, Pacific AMC and Blackstone-backed AirTrunk. That lowers execution risk and gives the pension investor access to operating expertise rather than forcing it to become an operator itself.
Second, it uses multiple instruments. Some deals are equity stakes, others are joint ventures, others are construction loans or holdco financing. The point is not to force every opportunity into a single template. It is to match capital to project maturity and risk. Africa often debates pension participation in binary terms – either funds invest directly or they do not. CPP’s record suggests a more useful spectrum: anchor equity, preferred equity, private credit, construction debt, and pooled infrastructure vehicles.
Third, governance comes before patriotism. CPP’s CEO has publicly warned against forcing the fund into politically directed domestic mandates, arguing that diversification and fiduciary discipline are essential to long-term performance. Africa should hear that carefully. The lesson is not that pension capital must stay offshore. It is that pension money will only scale into infrastructure if trustees believe projects are commercially sound, transparently governed and insulated from political extraction.
Fourth, digital infrastructure becomes investable when it is contractual. Wholesale fiber networks, shared neutral-host systems and pre-leased hyperscale data centers are attractive because revenues can be modeled. African governments that want pension capital in the sector need to create those conditions: bankable concession frameworks, open-access rules where appropriate, enforceable offtake structures, FX risk-sharing where necessary, and credible project preparation. Pension funds do not finance aspiration; they finance cash-flow visibility. This is exactly why Nigeria’s pension regulator has been pushing for more flexible rules and new vehicles for commercially viable infrastructure rather than policy-driven projects with weak returns.
Fifth, domestic capital is already larger than many African policymakers admit. Reuters reported in June 2025 that AFC sees roughly $4 trillion of local institutional and banking capital in Africa that could be redirected toward infrastructure if legal and regulatory barriers are eased. The OECD, meanwhile, said African pension fund assets amount to about 23 percent of GDP on average, versus 34 percent globally, while much of that money remains heavily concentrated in government securities. In other words, the continent’s problem is not only scarcity of savings. It is the absence of structures that convert savings into investable infrastructure pipelines.
None of this means African countries can simply copy Canada. CPP Investments sits atop a mature contributory pension system, strong institutions and deep capital markets. But the principle is transferable. Build independent pension governance. Allow prudent allocation to infrastructure and private markets. Standardize investment vehicles. Use DFIs and development banks to de-risk early transactions, not to permanently substitute for local capital. And above all, treat fiber, towers, interconnection and data centers as productive infrastructure deserving the same seriousness once reserved for ports, rail and power.
Africa’s digital infrastructure debate is often framed as a race to attract hyperscalers. That is too narrow. The more consequential question is whether African savings will help finance African digital foundations. Canada’s pension giant offers a persuasive answer: patient domestic capital can own the rails of the digital economy – if the state builds rules strong enough for capital to trust
