CG/LA Infrastructure and The Strategic Infrastructure Performance Institute help governments, project owners and investors decide what to build, prove when it can be built, and get it built. Thirty-nine years of project intelligence, published openly and put to work.
Capital found infrastructure. Readiness did not. The argument of the last thirty years was about money, and that argument has been won. The one that replaced it is harder.
Founded in Washington, D.C. in 1987. Non-partisan, independent, and read by governments, multilaterals and project owners across the Americas, the United States and Eurasia.
CG/LA publishes the Strategic 100 and puts its project intelligence to work through three services: the Infrastructure Audit, Ready-to-Build and Market Entry. Behind them sit GViP, the live project database, and a Leadership Forum network of more than 60,000 executives.
The Strategic Infrastructure Performance Institute carries the mission into public policy: long-term infrastructure thinking for governments, foundations, firms and investment promotion agencies, focused on the digitalization and electrification of infrastructure.
Together we publish the Global Strategic 100. The 2026 edition ranks the hundred projects that lead the world this year.
Get the report →A project that clears review in a year in one country waits a decade in another. That gap, more than the size of any balance sheet, now separates the countries that build from the ones that fall behind.
The Strategic 100 is our instrument for reading it. Any bank, data vendor or language model will hand you a pipeline list in nine seconds. The verdict is the product.
Drawn from a significantly larger set of live projects, then ranked on the merits. One project in eighteen made the final hundred.
Eighty of the hundred are in procurement or construction, at an average methodology score of 74 out of 100.
Roughly double what the world invests today. Public budgets alone will not cover it.
Three doors into one asset: thirty-nine years of curated project intelligence, and the standing to be believed when we publish a verdict.
Is this project real, and when?
For OEMs, EPCs, sponsors, utilities, funds, ECAs and DFIs, governments.
The Audit in detail →How do we make it buildable?
For digital and energy infrastructure developers, operators, sponsors.
Ready-to-Build in detail →How do we sell into it?
For manufacturers and OEMs, technology providers, industrial portfolios, investors.
Market Entry in detail →Water · Energy · Transport · Digital. No generalist strategy, no social infrastructure, no ESG reporting. The scope is the credibility.
The Institute's New American Model mobilizes private investment to help fund public highways, with planning driven by digitalized community input and transparency through auditable digital systems. Ohio's Route 30 is the proof of concept.
Designed, financed and developed with Senator Schuring and the State of Ohio, using digital twins and AI. Well underway.
The Ohio corridor →The hemisphere is under-built and over-announced. CG/LA is working on the corridors that can bring it back together.
The hemisphere →Published every year and free to download. What we sell later, to sponsors and subscribers, is the query platform behind it: the ability to build your own filtered view. The publication is the invitation; the instrument is the product.
Our recommendations to governments on getting projects across the line, written from the evidence in the Top 100. Non-partisan, unsponsored and unedited by any client. The moment it can be bought, the audit is worthless and the whole architecture collapses.
Three things we are looking for: a pipeline worth auditing, a site worth taking to shovel-ready, and a manufacturer who wants to be selling in the Americas within twelve months.
CG/LA’s annual ranking of the Global Infrastructure Market Place.
Each point is one ranked project, sized by value. Hover or tap for detail. The top ten are named here; ranks 11 to 100 are named in the full report.
Thirty-five pages: the complete ranked list, the methodology, eight spotlights, and our recommendations to governments. Free to everyone, no sign-up.
Looking for the 2022 North American edition? See it below ↓
The Strategic 100 most important infrastructure projects in the United States, published as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act began to move money. The report reads the new federal incentive package, maps projects and funding by region and sector, and spotlights water, connectivity, smart infrastructure, carbon capture, clean hydrogen, renewables, supply chains and inland waterways.
33 pages · PDF · imaging by Nearmap
The hundred projects that lead the list, and how they were chosen and balanced.
A global map and the figures behind it, showing value and count by sector, region, stage and quality.
Eight themes shaping the list, each carried by a marquee project.
What the pipeline shows, the conclusions that follow, and eight recommendations to governments.
The full ranked project list, in methodology-score order.
South America’s Southern Rail Network, Tecon Santos 10, and the wider Western Hemisphere corridor buildout.
CG/LA Infrastructure and the Strategic Infrastructure Performance Institute: mission, leadership and the team behind this edition.
A project that clears review in a year in one country waits a decade in another. That gap, more than the size of any balance sheet, now separates the countries that build from the ones that fall behind.
Drawn from a significantly larger set of live projects, then ranked on the merits. One project in eighteen made the final hundred.
Eighty of the hundred are in procurement or construction, at an average methodology score of 74 out of 100. This is a near-term list.
Roughly double what the world invests today. Public budgets alone will not cover it, and good intentions will not build it.
Every project in the database carries a CG/LA methodology score from 0 to 100. A score of 65 or higher marks a project strong enough to be considered. Diversification rules then guarantee every region and sector a place, and caps keep any single country, sector or category from crowding out the rest. Merit sets the order. Breadth keeps it honest.
Power / T&D leads by value and by average score (87). Water & Sanitation carries fifteen projects on US$7 billion: essential works the ranking surfaces by design.
Ranked by CG/LA methodology score. Value in US$ billion. Tuas Port in Singapore tops the list at 92 as the most complete strategic bet in the field. Price had nothing to do with it.
| # | Project | Country | Sector | Stage | $B | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tuas Port development | Singapore | Ports | Construction | 25.00 | 92 |
| 2 | Guangdong Taipingling nuclear power plant phase III (units 5 and 6) | China | Power / T&D | Procurement | 6.00 | 92 |
| 3 | Shanbei-Anhui ±800kV UHV DC transmission project | China | Power / T&D | Operations | 3.50 | 92 |
| 4 | CATL-Haibo Sichuang 60GWh sodium-ion battery storage supply agreement | China | Power / T&D | Procurement | 3.50 | 92 |
| 5 | CATL Shandong Jining sodium-ion battery plant | China | Power / T&D | Construction | 1.50 | 92 |
| 6 | Liaoning Zhuanghe nuclear power plant phase I | China | Power / T&D | Procurement | 7.50 | 90 |
| 7 | Dutch offshore wind program (21GW by 2032) | Netherlands | Power / T&D | Concept | 35.00 | 89 |
| 8 | UAE-US AI campus in Abu Dhabi | UAE | Telecom & Digital | Construction | 11.50 | 89 |
| 9 | Etihad Rail passenger network (Abu Dhabi–Fujairah line) | UAE | Urban Mass Transit | Operations | 10.50 | 89 |
| 10 | NEOM green hydrogen project | Saudi Arabia | Power / T&D | Construction | 8.20 | 89 |
| 11 | Ranks 11 to 100 are in the full report, with country, sector, subsector, stage, value and score for every project. | Unlock → | ||||
The defining story this year is the energy transition at industrial scale, with digital infrastructure now the single largest block of value on the list.
A ~5-gigawatt AI data-center and science-park campus, the largest outside the United States, powered by a nuclear, solar and gas mix.
A national program to reach ~21 GW of offshore capacity by 2032, around a sixth of Dutch energy demand, with ecology scored directly in the tender.
A six-runway mega-airport on a ~69 km² site, targeting up to 185 million passengers a year by 2050.
The backbone of a ~US$39B, 200 km automated-metro network of 68 stations ringing Paris, Europe’s largest urban-transport project.
Lifting recycled, desalinated and harvested water above 17 billion m³ a year across China’s most water-stressed regions.
~4 GW of wind and solar with 2 GW of electrolyzers, making 1.2 million tons of green ammonia a year and avoiding ~5 Mt of CO₂.
IFC and EBRD financing to rebuild Ukraine’s fixed and mobile backbone for some 10 million mobile subscribers and 4 million homes, resilient to grid attack.
The world’s largest fully automated container terminal, electrified and solar-powered, handling about 65 million containers a year when complete.
The list identifies the projects. These eight recommendations are about the conditions that let them move, written for any government serious about turning ambition into delivery.
One digital, AI-assisted platform for environmental and permitting review, with a hard deadline on legal challenge.
Published, independently reviewed assessments and hard water and carbon figures before public backing.
A chartered, privately managed infrastructure bank, and corridor enterprises like Ohio Route 30.
Generation mix, grid connectivity with real redundancy, and distributed generation as preconditions for competitiveness.
First-mover public support for the grid and storage that move and firm the headline megawatts.
Consensus criteria written into building codes and funding programs, priced by insurers and financiers.
A data-driven office that assesses whole-life impact and keeps a transparent, merit-ranked pipeline.
Export finance and coordinated cross-border corridors for the firms that will shape the next decade.
GViP, the live database behind this report. A continuously updated global pipeline, sourced from the industry supply chain and organized by the CG/LA methodology: 1,834 projects analyzed for 2026, US$2.9 trillion of pipeline value, 134 countries.
Get the full report →Creating Great, Long-term Assets Improving people’s lives through infrastructure, since 1987.
CG/LA opens three doors into one asset: thirty-nine years of curated project intelligence, and the standing to be believed when we publish a verdict about it.
Ninety years of comparable data across 104 countries and six continents. The record has not improved in seven decades of trying.
| Service | The question | What you get | Who buys it |
|---|---|---|---|
| I · Infrastructure Audit | Is this project real, and when? | A signed verdict: Bankable, Conditional or Announced Only, with named breakers, owners and dates | OEMs, EPCs, sponsors, utilities, funds, ECAs and DFIs, governments |
| II · Ready-to-Build | How do we make it buildable? | A site taken through six gates to shovel-ready, scored on the Ready-to-Build Index | Digital and energy infrastructure developers, operators, sponsors |
| III · Market Entry | How do we sell into it? | A named project list, the local structure to win, introductions and the transaction | Manufacturers and OEMs, technology providers, industrial portfolios, investors |
A study describes. An audit reaches a conclusion, signs it, and can be wrong.
Is this project real, and when? Independent verdicts on single projects or whole pipelines, resolving the two numbers nobody else underwrites: the date, and what will break it. Delivered in weeks, at a fee a director can approve.
OEMs, EPCs, sponsors, utilities, funds, ECAs and DFIs, governments.
Legal instrument in force, or only an announcement? Appropriated budget line, or a headline? Who holds signature authority, by name? Exposure to the electoral cycle before close.
Procurement and delivery calendars reconciled separately. Critical path named. Long-lead equipment ordered, budgeted or not contemplated. Reference-class comparison against completed analogues.
Sponsor close rate. EPC record in days late on comparable scope. Supplier performance by product family and by name. Integrity screening and concentration risk.
Every source classified as appropriated, committed or announced. Multilateral disbursement history. Tariff structure and indexation. Revenue currency against debt currency.
Every verdict carries named breakers. “Regulatory risk” is too vague to count. “The license renewal falls due in month fourteen, with an agency averaging nine months, and no application has been filed” is a breaker.
The technical layer of a data center is solved. Every schedule dies in what sits underneath it.
How do we make it buildable? We take a site through six gates, from land and permits to a contracted Ready-to-Build Index, across data centers, generation, storage and hydrogen alike.
Digital and energy infrastructure developers, operators, sponsors.
Title, zoning, geotechnical, adjacency to transmission and fiber, expansion optionality, option executed.
Queue position, firm MW with an energization date, PPA or self-generation, long-lead equipment ordered.
Abstraction rights held, cooling architecture, discharge consent, drought exposure, political durability.
Licensing pathway named instrument by instrument, with the statutory clock and the realistic clock beside it.
Route diversity, carrier commitments, latency to exchange points, true cost of the last kilometer.
Municipality, tariff, employment case, community, and the counterfactual use of the land and water.
Each gate is scored Secured, In Process or Not Started, weighted by critical path, and resolved to a single number from 0 to 100. Investors read the index as a price.
Companies with a good product and no local structure lose, consistently, to companies with a worse product and better registration.
How do we sell into it? A named project list from our global database, with the structure, local content and execution on the ground to win the transaction.
Manufacturers and OEMs, technology providers, industrial portfolios, investors.
A named project list drawn from the database. Filter by sector, sub-sector, stage, geography and opportunity type, and get back the projects that will actually buy this product in the next eighteen months, with the buying entity named and the procurement window estimated.
Representation, distribution, joint venture or subsidiary, chosen against the tax and liability facts. Homologation and certification with their real clocks. Local content and margin-of-preference arithmetic. Procurement-regime literacy, which in Brazil means Law 14.133/2021 and the concession frameworks.
Direct introductions to sponsors, EPCs, utilities and public owners, plus placement inside the partner events where the buyers already gather. Thirty-nine years of relationships, put to work as a product.
Where the client wants it, we go past advice: trading and logistics execution, and structured finance for the transaction. CG/LA holds trading capability in Brazil. Very few advisors will carry that risk.
Published free and cited without payment. It is the reason a first meeting happens at all.
Weeks rather than quarters, a fee a director can approve, and the deepest first-party data we hold.
Every Conditional verdict is a list of things that are broken and can be fixed for a fee.
Assets moving to construction need vendors; vendors need entry, structure and introductions.
Verified project intelligence returns to the engine, and next year’s list beats anything assembled from press releases.
Consultancies never touch the asset. Developers have no independent voice. Event companies own the room and have nothing to say in it. No one else publishes the ranking, audits the project, and gets it to shovel-ready.
The Institute’s transformational approach to public infrastructure, from Ohio’s Route 30 to the corridors bringing the Western Hemisphere back together.
The New American Model mobilizes private investment to help fund important public highway projects while creating enhanced opportunities for the communities the highways pass through. It starts from three recognitions.
Working with Senator Schuring and the State of Ohio, The Institute is designing, financing and developing the Ohio Route 30 Opportunity Corridor, a demonstration of the American Model for maximizing community benefits.
Planning driven by digitalized community input from the places the corridor passes through.
Transparency through auditable digital systems, with digital twinning and AI as critical elements of the project.
A public/private enterprise that mobilizes private investment and monetizes the highway and its rights of way.
The financing model behind Ohio’s US-30 expansion, built through The Institute, was structured without new user fees or reliance on federal or state funding. It draws instead on three revenue streams.
The 2026 Strategic 100 cites the corridor as the shift in miniature: infrastructure financed and run as an enterprise. The same approach informs the Texas SH130 Intelligent Infrastructure Corridor.
Two thirds of regional infrastructure funding has historically come from public sources, and fiscal space is closing. Private capital is available and increasingly willing. What it cannot find is projects that are ready to receive it.
Strategic corridors that cut across the Americas, whether bioceanic, energy or digital, are the assets that turn regional integration from a communiqué into cash flow. They are also the assets most likely to stall, because they cross jurisdictions, currencies and electoral calendars. That is precisely the class of project that needs an independent verdict on timing before anyone commits capital.
Regional infrastructure integration in South America enters the 2026 Top 100 with two highlights.
A 4,278 km rail re-concession that affects Brazil and Argentina directly, with wider Mercosul impacts. Southern Brazil’s core freight-rail system links São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul with the ports of Paranaguá, São Francisco do Sul and Rio Grande, and the Argentine network at Uruguaiana. The current concession ends in February 2027; the new project is designed as a 30-year concession.
A 621,975 m² mega container terminal on the right bank of the Port of Santos, South America’s largest port, consolidating fragmented terminal areas into one facility with four berths and a 25-year lease. It will become Brazil’s largest container terminal and lift Santos’s capacity by nearly 50%.
The Institute: Bold Ideas, Extraordinary Results.
Clients include governments, foundations, firms and investment promotion agencies. The overall focus is the digitalization and electrification of infrastructure: driving good jobs, optimizing project benefits and increasing economic productivity.
Corridors and programs that change a region’s economics, such as Ohio Route 30.
Digital twins, AI and auditable digital systems built into public infrastructure.
Bankable models such as a State Infrastructure Bank for Nevada and the US-30 financing structure.
Planning driven by digitalized community input, so the places a project crosses share in its benefits.
The Institute is the non-profit research arm of CG/LA Infrastructure, co-founded by Anand Hemnani, and carries CG/LA’s mission into public policy. Together they publish the Global Strategic 100.
“The Institute combines the best minds in infrastructure to create blueprints governments, institutions and the private sector can follow to establish the strategic objectives, funding framework, and staffing to efficiently bring projects to life. Ultimately, these efforts will drive sustainable economic, health, environmental, and other broad community benefits.”Norman Anderson, Founder, The Institute
Route 30, designed, financed and developed with the State of Ohio.
Explore →Co-published with CG/LA. The 2026 edition ranks 100 projects in 47 countries.
Get the report →Improving people’s lives through infrastructure, since 1987.
Norman Anderson founded CG/LA Infrastructure in 1987 on a simple conviction: great infrastructure, built well and on time, is how societies create lasting value for everyone who depends on it. Infrastructure is the physical foundation of economic and social progress, and that progress is won or lost one project at a time. It is the argument of his book Vision, and the reason the Strategic 100 ranks projects rather than plans or spending pledges.
Nearly four decades on, CG/LA is one of the most recognized independent voices in the global infrastructure market, working across more than twenty countries.
Where we work sets us apart. Consultancies produce the analysis and never touch the asset. Developers touch the asset and have no independent voice. CG/LA does both: it publishes the ranking, audits the project, and gets it to shovel-ready.
Global Visualizing Infrastructure Projects, the live database CG/LA created before the advent of the internet. Today it tracks a US$2.9 trillion pipeline across 134 countries.
The annual ranking of the projects that matter, published for the better part of two decades and free to download.
For over thirty years, CG/LA has put project owners in the room with the people who could build for them.
Development, M&A, brownfield and greenfield mandates across every infrastructure sector.
Norman Anderson initiated the World Economic Forum study Accelerating Infrastructure Delivery (2014) and authored a white paper for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee the same year. CG/LA’s partners speak regularly at international infrastructure conferences, most recently at the 47th Hemispheric Congress of CAMACOL with the OAS in Miami.
Leads CG/LA after more than 30 years of fieldwork, analysis and deal-making across Latin American and global infrastructure markets, with responsibility for the Audit and Ready-to-Build practices. Co-founder of The Institute and main point of contact for the 2026 Strategic 100.
ahemnani@cg-la.com
Visiting Scholar at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin. Opened the Brazilian offices of the Port of Houston Authority and the Greater Houston Partnership.
Managing founder of Torus.consulting and co-founder of Dínamo. Contributed to Brazil’s Legal Framework for Startups and previously led the Innovation Unit of the São Paulo State Government.
bfreitas@cg-la.com
Lead analyst on the 2026 Global Strategic 100 and co-author of the report.
Founder of CG/LA Infrastructure in 1987 and of The Institute. Author of Vision. He began his career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay.
729 15th Street NW, Suite 600
Washington, D.C. 20005
+1 202 776 0990
CG/LA Infrastructure and The Strategic Infrastructure Performance Institute
Avenida Ipiranga, 318, Bloco B, Cj 302
São Paulo SP 01046-010
Market Entry, Audit and Ready-to-Build practices
Interested in joining us? Get in touch ↗
Tell us about a pipeline worth auditing, a site worth taking to shovel-ready, or a market you want to enter. Each route below reaches the partner who leads that work.
Questions about the firm, partnerships and press.
Managing Partner and main point of contact for the 2026 Strategic 100.
Senior Partner for Market Entry and Pipeline Conversion.
Opportunity Corridors, state programs and research partnerships.
729 15th Street NW, Suite 600
Washington, D.C. 20005
Avenida Ipiranga, 318, Bloco B, Cj 302
São Paulo SP 01046-010
Follow CG/LA. News on the Strategic 100, corridors and our services.