On the morning of May 7, 2026, two officials in Dhaka signed a memorandum the country had been waiting on for the better part of a decade. Dr. Julia Moin of the Bangladesh Economic Zones Authority and Afroza Sultana of the Bangladesh Power Development Board put their names to a single 412-acre solar project: a 130-to-140-megawatt plant with battery storage, to be built on unused public land in Sonagazi, in Feni district.
The Asian Development Bank had positioned itself behind the deal as Transaction Advisor, preparing the feasibility studies and the international competitive bidding process that would follow. The project itself was small. Around the world, in Singapore, the executives at Summit Group, Bangladesh’s largest independent power producer with more than 2,000 megawatts of capacity across 14 plants, were watching for what the procurement that followed would actually look like. So were the development banks. So was every foreign developer who had spent the past 10 years trying to build utility-scale renewables in Bangladesh and had given up.
A Bankability Test
For more than a decade, the story of Bangladeshi renewables has been one of aspiration that didn’t translate. The country today generates roughly 1,734 megawatts from renewable sources, 1,441 of which is solar. The Bangladesh Sustainable and Renewable Energy Association has set a target of 10,000 megawatts of solar by 2030.
Closing that gap will require the kind of utility-scale projects that have repeatedly stalled on the same three problems: getting the land, enforcing the contract, and putting together a procurement pathway that international financiers can actually underwrite. That, formally, is what the new framework is built for. Its title is the Guidelines for Development of Renewable Energy Projects Using Land Owned by Government Agencies under PPP Modality, 2026.
The architecture splits responsibilities cleanly. BEZA provides the land. BPDB is the contracting authority and the off-taker. A Government Facilitation Agreement is structured to give lenders comfort that the project will reach commercial operation without the friction that has stalled earlier attempts. And ADB sits behind it as Transaction Advisor, a presence that does not, by itself, guarantee bankability but does signal it.
Imran Chowdhury, who directs the Bangladesh Sustainable and Renewable Energy Association, told pv magazine that improved land availability “would accelerate project development and unlock a strong, bankable pipeline of large-scale solar projects”. But he also raised the harder question, the one the framework cannot answer in advance: whether the PPP contract and the Government Facilitation Agreement will actually hold up over the 20-to-25-year tenor that solar financing requires.
Sonagazi is the first of what officials describe as a replicable pipeline. Procurement begins in August 2026. A new investment-friendly renewable energy policy is expected by June. For international developers and the development finance institutions that lend to them, the Sonagazi tender will be read as precedent. The tariff outcome will set the price of risk for everything that comes next.
The Pressure Behind the Pivot
Bangladesh’s pivot toward bankable renewables is not happening in a vacuum. The country imported 109 LNG cargoes in 2025 at a cost of roughly $3.88 billion, and it relies on imports for about 95 percent of its energy needs. The numbers come from Muhammed Aziz Khan, the founder and chairman of Summit Group, in his April 3, 2026 Insight Conversation with S&P Global.
Khan also offered a forecast he framed as arithmetic, not opinion. The same import bill, under sustained price pressure, could climb to $7 billion or more. Khan described that level as one the country can ill afford.
A Middle East conflict closed the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year and exposed exactly how thin the supply chain ran. Qatar suspended long-term LNG deliveries to Bangladesh under force majeure. On the liquid fuel side, the country had roughly one month of diesel and heavy fuel oil in stock. That was the stockpile. That was the buffer.
Khan’s policy prescription, delivered to S&P, was direct. Temporarily remove taxes on imported LNG, coal, diesel, and fuel oil to lower procurement costs. Instruct BPDB and Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation to rent under-utilized private storage terminals — terminals that already exist, sitting empty — and stockpile fuel while it remains available. Diversify LNG sourcing beyond the Hormuz corridor. Accelerate offshore gas exploration in the Bay of Bengal.
The structural answer, in Khan’s framing, runs through privatization and through PPP frameworks credible enough to bring foreign direct investment into LNG import, regasification, and distribution. “Privatization is key to securing foreign direct investment,” he told S&P. “Huge investments are necessary for the country to eradicate poverty and transform into a developed nation”.
Sonagazi sits inside that calculus. Every megawatt of domestic solar capacity is a megawatt of LNG demand the country does not have to finance in dollars. The arithmetic is part of why the government is moving on the framework now.
Summit’s Next Phase
Khan has spent the past two years recalibrating the company Summit Group intends to be in the post-LNG era. The shape of that recalibration came into view in a January 2026 interview he gave to Nikkei Asia. The company would not be exiting power.
But it would be adding a second pillar.
“Summit Group’s key focus going forward will be energy and data growth, with the aim of strengthening Bangladesh’s LNG sector and fibre-optic infrastructure,” Khan told Nikkei Asia. Summit Power International is the group’s Singapore-incorporated power arm, where JERA, Japan’s largest power generation company, has held a 22 percent stake since October 2019. That partnership has been the institutional spine of Summit’s access to international capital. It lets the group borrow on terms most Bangladeshi developers cannot reach domestically.
Two lines of work are converging. On the supply side, Summit’s FSRU at Moheshkhali supplied roughly 13 percent of Bangladesh’s total gas demand during the 2024-2025 financial year. But other supply-side initiatives have not gone as cleanly. The onshore LNG terminal Summit had planned at Matarbari Island stalled after the 2024 repeal of the special provisions act under which it had been tendered. The third FSRU contract was canceled by the government and is currently under judicial review.
On the demand side, Summit Communications already carries close to half of the country’s internet traffic across a nationwide fiber-optic network (https://thefinancialexpress.com.bd/trade/summit-group-sets-sights-on-bangladeshs-first-data-center). Add the existing gas-fired generation footprint, and the company’s land holdings around its plants, and Summit Group has the three inputs that any aspiring data center developer in South Asia spends years trying to assemble. Most spend longer.
The Data Center Build-Out
Bangladesh’s data center market is small. It is growing fast. Installed IT load reached 23.55 megawatts in 2025 and is forecast to hit 150.6 megawatts by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of just under 45 percent, by Mordor Intelligence’s accounting.
Hyperscale colocation already accounts for 62 percent of utilized capacity. Dhaka holds 49 percent of the national market share. Bangladesh’s Personal Data Protection Ordinance, adopted in 2025, classifies personally identifiable data as “Critical” and requires onshore storage, which locks in a structural floor for domestic colocation demand that did not exist three years ago.
Summit’s intention is to build the country’s first hyperscale-grade facility. Khan told Nikkei Asia the company has been in contact with seven global technology companies (Alphabet, Microsoft, Tesla, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, and Meta Platforms) and that “some of them have shown interest in working together. Summit will finalise a partnership decision within this year.” The initial site is expected near one of SPI’s gas-fired plants close to Dhaka, on land Summit already owns.
The pitch is one of speed. “The three key requirements for a data centre are electricity, fibre and land,” Khan told Nikkei Asia, “and Summit has all three.” He added: “Although establishing a fully operational data centre will take several years, we aim to open services for customers within 18 months”. For a market where global cloud platforms are preparing Local Zone and Edge deployments, an 18-month timeline against an industry norm of several years is a substantive proposition. Possibly the most substantive on offer in the region.
Where the Two Stories Converge
This is where the Sonagazi framework and Summit’s data center plans stop being separate stories. Bangladesh’s data center sector faces a real bottleneck on the power side: despite installed capacity above 28 gigawatts, distribution losses mean that only 12 to 13 gigawatts reach end-users with any reliability, and operators today oversize diesel backup at significant operating cost. Analysts at Mordor Intelligence cite the scarcity of renewable power purchase agreements as a material drag on the sector’s growth ceiling.
Operators, the analysts note, are lobbying for renewable PPAs as “the next competitive differentiator.”
A working PPP framework for utility-scale solar with battery storage, anchored by ADB transaction advisory and a Government Facilitation Agreement, is precisely the instrument that would let hyperscale tenants source clean power directly. Sonagazi includes battery storage explicitly because grid stability for industrial consumers is part of the design brief. If the template scales, Bangladesh becomes a market where data center operators can sign long-tenor renewable PPAs against bankable counterparties instead of running diesel.
Summit, with its existing gas-fired baseload and its fiber footprint, becomes positionable as the developer who can package both sides of that equation. Khan has been candid about the limits. “We still have major plans to invest in solar and hydropower projects in India, Nepal and Bhutan and import clean energy into Bangladesh,” he told Nikkei Asia. But he also acknowledged that strained bilateral relations have become a significant obstacle. Summit’s planned 500 megawatt offshore wind project with Danish investors has been delayed amid political uncertainty. Cross-border clean energy import remains a real long-term option. Its timeline is no longer controlled by the developers.
What International Capital Is Watching
For lenders and institutional stakeholders monitoring Bangladesh from London, Singapore, and Tokyo, the picture is messier than the headline figures suggest. But the architecture is improving.
The Renewable Energy Policy 2025, the PPP guidelines for renewables on public land, and ADB’s willingness to anchor transaction advisory on the first project together amount to a credible attempt to make Bangladeshi infrastructure investable on terms a development finance committee can actually defend. Summit Group brings JERA on the share register, a Singapore holding structure built specifically for global capital access, and fiber, gas, and land all under one roof. That posture sits inside the new architecture as one of the few operators capable of executing under it.
A national election in February adds the variable no investor can model. Khan’s comment on what foreign backers want, delivered to Nikkei Asia, is worth quoting plainly: “For investment, the essential foundations are rule of law, democracy and policy predictability. A prime minister elected by the people would hopefully be able to give at least five years of certainty in their policymaking”. Political certainty is the variable the PPP framework alone cannot resolve.
Sonagazi is small. Summit Group’s data center, on current timeline, will not announce its partner for several more months. Each is a signal of the same shift: a Bangladesh willing to write contracts international financiers can underwrite, and a private power sector positioning to deliver both halves of what the country’s next decade actually needs.
