Our Focus (3/4): Infrastructure

By Infrastructure, we mean institutional investment in the physical and digital systems economies rely on. That includes power generation and grids, data centers and fibre networks, transport, utilities, and the businesses that operate them. These assets tend to require large amounts of capital, operate for many years, and provide services people and companies depend on every day.1

Building what comes next

Infrastructure has always mattered. What is different today is how many major investment cycles are happening at the same time. Existing transport, power, water, and other essential systems need to be renewed. Electricity demand is rising. Digital infrastructure is expanding around AI and cloud computing. Governments and companies are also investing more in resilience, energy security, and domestic capacity.

All of this has to be built.

McKinsey estimates that around $106 trillion of infrastructure investment will be required globally through 2040. Transport accounts for roughly $36 trillion, energy and power $23 trillion, digital infrastructure $19 trillion, and social infrastructure another $16 trillion.2

The important point is not simply the size of that number. It is how broad the buildout has become.

AI makes this particularly visible. A data center may look like one asset, but it cannot operate on its own. It needs electricity generation, grid capacity, transmission, cooling, fibre, land, and the capital to finance all of them.

Global data-center electricity demand is expected to rise sharply through the end of the decade as AI and cloud computing expand. That demand does not stop at the walls of the data center. It flows into power markets, grids, utilities, construction, and digital networks around it.3

Technology may create the demand. Infrastructure determines whether that demand can actually be met.

Learning from the firms allocating capital

Infrastructure is therefore becoming an increasingly important part of REA’s industry engagement. Across the network, we engage with firms including Blackstone, KKR, Brookfield, Macquarie, EQT, and others investing across infrastructure and the wider real-assets market.

Members engage with the industry through investment cases, inhouse days, site visits, infrastructure and financing workshops, City Trips, conversations with investment professionals, and recruitment opportunities.

It is also important to engage with the industry from different angles. Infrastructure sits between investment, development, financing, technology, regulation, and operations. Understanding only one of those doesn’t tell the full story.

Why Infrastructure is a core focus for REA

Infrastructure is where large economic changes become physical assets and investment decisions. That is what makes the field particularly interesting for many of our members. The assets are tangible, but the forces behind them range from technology and demographics to geopolitics, energy security, and long-term economic growth.

There is another side to this. Large infrastructure needs do not automatically become good investments. Projects still need the right demand, regulation, pricing, financing, and risk allocation. The question is not simply what society needs to build, but which projects can attract capital on terms that work for everyone involved.

That judgment is what makes the field interesting.

Our aim at REA is therefore to give members broad exposure across sectors, strategies, firms, and geographies, as well as to the different forms of capital used to finance, build, and own these assets (from private equity and private credit to project finance and the broader debt and equity capital markets).5

Many chapters now place infrastructure at the centre of their partner engagement, particularly across APAC, but increasingly in other regions as well.

For our members, that means exposure not only to investors, but also to developers, lenders, operators, advisers, and the people actually building these systems. The more angles they see, the better they can understand how an infrastructure investment really comes together.

Infrastructure is ultimately the business of financing, building, and owning the systems the economy depends on. As those systems require more capital, technology, and capacity, the people deciding what gets built, and how, will become even more important.