Helios Investment Partners has completed the sale of its 75 percent equity stake in Axxela Limited to BlueCore Gas InfraCo Limited, a consortium of Nigerian and international energy players that includes Afrigaz Energie LLP, Levene Energy Development, emPERSAND Limited, and Energy & Infrastructure LLP. Afrigaz Energie is a portfolio company of the Stanbic IBTC Infrastructure Fund. The transaction opens a new expansion phase for Axxela, with the consortium already securing a $285 million financing facility from Rand Merchant Bank to scale gas infrastructure projects across Nigeria.
Read narrowly, the deal is a clean private-equity exit from a mature energy asset. Read strategically, it signals something more important: a deliberate recycling of Helios capital from a stabilized industrial platform into the next binding constraint in Africa’s infrastructure stack – digital infrastructure, and specifically compute capacity anchored by bankable power and connectivity.
Helios’ exit from Axxela is best understood as portfolio rebalancing. Over the past several years, the firm has built depth across African “hard” infrastructure and technology-adjacent assets. What is changing is its center of gravity. In 2022, Helios acquired majority stakes in Kenya’s IXAfrica and Morocco’s Maroc Datacenter. In 2025, Helios expanded its digital infrastructure portfolio, launching a dedicated platform with Fipar-Holding, acquiring Moroccan data center and IT services assets, and pursuing a controlling stake in Telecom Egypt’s Regional Data Hub data center business. Against that backdrop, monetizing a scaled gas distribution platform in Nigeria aligns with a strategy of redeploying capital toward Africa’s next growth frontier.
Digital infrastructure has become one of the few African asset classes where demand is accelerating. Revenues are increasingly tied to enterprise digitization, cloud adoption, and cross-border digital trade rather than cyclical commodity exposure. Helios’ positioning around Fund V reinforces this tilt, with development and institutional capital framed around digitally focused businesses and related sectors.
Two forces are driving this shift. First, compute is forcing a new kind of infrastructure bundling. Data centers are now hybrid. Real estate, connectivity, as well as power projects. This favors investors that can structure platforms, aggregate demand, and scale across markets, a model closer to private infrastructure investing than venture capital.
Second, digital infrastructure has become a strategic lever for governments. Data centers, subsea landing ecosystems, and national fiber backbones are increasingly treated as competitiveness assets, pulling regulatory attention, incentives, and, in some cases, public-sector alignment behind the sector.
Seen through this lens, Axxela’s business is not unrelated to Helios’ digital thesis. It is adjacent. Gas-to-industry and gas-to-power increasingly sit in the same enabling layer that determines whether data center capacity can be deployed at institutional scale in Nigeria and across West Africa. Power reliability remains the binding constraint for both traditional industry and modern digital infrastructure.
The structure of the transaction reinforces that logic. Helios sold its majority stake to BlueCore Gas InfraCo, while Sojitz exercised tag-along rights to exit its minority position, resulting in a full shareholder transition. Axxela remains an energy infrastructure platform critical to Nigeria’s industrial base, while BlueCore enters with an execution-focused mandate and fresh capital.
For Helios, the move reflects a classic private capital playbook. Value is created through long-horizon operational buildout and stabilization, followed by an exit to owners designed to scale the asset class further. Capital is then redeployed into a higher-growth layer where the next bottlenecks are still being shaped – power, sites, permitting, and regulatory readiness for compute.
The implications for African data centers and cloud markets are indirect but decisive. Energy platforms are becoming part of the data center pipeline. West Africa’s data center growth will not be determined by demand narratives alone, but by whether power can be secured and expanded on credible timelines with bankable contracts. Under BlueCore’s ownership, Axxela strengthens the probability of more coordinated gas-to-power expansion, and in Nigeria, gas remains one of the few scalable near-term levers for adding firm capacity where grids are constrained.
If executed well, this improves the feasibility of multi-tenant colocation growth beyond Lagos’ core zones, edge capacity in secondary commercial hubs, and eventually larger campus-style compute clusters that require phased power scaling. Cloud markets will follow these physical realities. Where power becomes more reliable and expandable, cloud adoption deepens and data localization becomes practical. Where power remains uncertain, demand still exists, but value capture shifts offshore.
At a capital-markets level, the transaction underscores a maturing investment cycle in Africa. Infrastructure assets are now being built, scaled, exited, and redeployed in patterns that increasingly resemble more developed markets. The message to regulators and policymakers is clear: capital follows coherence. Where energy, connectivity, and permitting frameworks are predictable, investors can underwrite multi-phase platforms, whether gas pipelines or data centers. Where they are not, markets fracture into smaller projects, costly self-supply, and constrained scale.
Helios is not choosing between energy infrastructure and digital infrastructure; it is sequencing them. Axxela was a bet on the enabling layer that powers industrial productivity. Helios’ accelerating push into data centers and digital platforms is a bet on the enabling layer that will power the next decade of African enterprise growth, cloud localization, and AI-era competitiveness. The signal is clear: Helios has found conviction in digital infrastructure, and its next moves are likely to deepen, not dilute, that commitment.
