The rising popularity of mobile applications and devices has brought about an enhanced interest in infrastructure support for mobile computing. Our work focuses on the development of a mobile grid infrastructure called MAPGrid (mobile applications on Grids), where grid resources are exploited as proxies to enable advanced mobile applications. However, intermittent availability of grid resources presents challenges for data-intensive mobile applications. In this paper, we propose novel methodologies for placing mobile data on grid proxies. We introduce a notion of two-tier architecture for MAPGrid, where the upper tier captures grid related features and the lower tier represents features associated with mobile environments. We further develop an intelligent mobile data placement mechanism that effectively balances tradeoffs between replication cost and data access cost by leveraging knowledge of grid availability and mobile data request patterns. Through extensive experimentation, we illustrate the superiority of the proposed techniques over several popular data placement strategies.