Competing digital powers — the US, EU, and China — export technologies and contest the rules governing cyberspace, while third countries, particularly in Africa, face critical questions about infrastructure alignment and its consequences for cyber governance. Existing literature has predominantly treated this as an asymmetric power relationship where digital empires pursue digital expansionist goals through digital infrastructure export and norm entrepreneurship, casting other states as passive recipients shaped by geopolitical alignment and techno-dependency. We argue that this conception overlooks the agency of emerging digital powers navigating competing normative regimes. Focusing on Nigeria, we ask what factors shape digital infrastructure alignment and whether alignment predisposes regulatory preferences. We find that Nigeria practices what we term ‘cyber normative pluralism’ - the deliberate maintenance of concurrent, incompatible normative commitments across digital infrastructure partnerships, driven by domestic governance objectives rather than alignment with a single normative bloc. Infrastructure choices reflect cost considerations, domestic development objectives, partner availability, and existing trade relationships rather than geopolitical allegiance. This challenges assumptions about a Washington, Brussels, or Beijing effect, and establishes that emerging digital powers exercise agency through multi-partner diversification and selective policy borrowing that prioritises domestic development over normative consistency.

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