Not quite, there are two basic strategies either make a high but profitable bid to try and win or make a low bid on the off chance nobody does the first strategy.
In practice there are dozens of players bidding on infrastructure assets globally. The assets tend to be easy to model, easy to finance and hence finance types (like all the PEs, pension funds etc) love them.
No one bidding on these assets is giggling about how much money they are going to make. They are thinking "we are bidding a lot here, these returns don't look so hot, how can we justify this??" and then praying their projections aren't off on the downside. At least, in the first world. There does appear to have been some shady dealings in Russia, Mexico etc in the 90's.
I would add China and several countries to that list of shady dealings and far more recently than the 90’s.
Beyond that you can find plenty of exceptions in first world countries of underbidding paying off, though mostly at the local scale. For a specific example look at US high speed internet a little closer and you can find taxpayers getting screwed.
A specific example of a massive underbid would be the 99 year lease on Chicago’s skyway. Which was $1.8 billion for a 99 year lease which was not just profitable every year, but after 10 years they sold the remaining 89 year lease for 2.8 billion.