213. Big Funds, Bigger Bets: Inside Infrastructure’s Power Shift - Jan26

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Jan 26, 2026

Zak Bentley, Americas Editor at Infrastructure Investor, tracks fundraising and market data in infrastructure. He explores the 2025 fundraising surge and why capital is concentrating among mega-platforms. He discusses the data center boom and its pull on renewables and grids. He covers sector shifts like the return of airports, a reset in ESG, and gas rebranding as energy transition.

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ANECDOTE

Unusual Assets Still Attract Funds

Infrastructure deals can include surprising assets, like chicken farming and firefighting helicopters in 2025.
Zak Bentley highlighted laundry businesses and other quirky purchases as part of the market's diversity.

INSIGHT

Data Centers Drive Digital And Energy Demand

Digital infrastructure has broadened beyond towers to include data centers and fiber, driven further by AI demand.
Data centers now sit at the center of many infrastructure strategies and pull energy investments with them.

ANECDOTE

Offshore Wind Permits Were Cancelled

The US saw cancelled offshore wind permits late in 2025, including projects already delivering or near-delivery.
Zak Bentley used these cancellations to explain investor caution in the US renewables market.

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The infrastructure fund industry has become one of the most powerful engines behind the rise of renewables and datacenters. With Zak Bentley, Americas Editor, Infrastructure Investor (part of the PEI Group), Laurent and Gerard cut through the noise to deliver a clear-eyed view of where the infrastructure market really stands today.

2025 smashed fundraising records, with c.USD300bn raised, but it also laid bare an uncomfortable truth: this is a market in consolidation mode. Capital is concentrating fast, and the biggest platforms are pulling further ahead.

Global Infrastructure Partners set a new benchmark with its USD25.2bn Fund V, the largest infrastructure fund ever raised. Macquarie closed more than USD8bn for Infrastructure Partners VI, including co-investments, while Blackstone raised USD5.5bn for Strategic Partners Infrastructure IV, the largest infrastructure secondaries fund to date. Brookfield, KKR, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, and Ardian were also among the clear winners. Scale matters, and the leaders are taking an ever-larger share of the pie.

Fundraising may look healthier on the surface, but the process has become longer and harder. Time on the road has stretched to around 25 months, meaning a large portion of the capital “raised” in 2025 was secured across 2023 and 2024. This is not a detail; it is the clearest symptom of the barbell dynamic now dominating infrastructure fundraising, where capital flows either to the very largest platforms or to highly differentiated specialists.

Sector trends are also evolving. Airports and toll roads, written off after COVID, are back in favour. Social infrastructure is fading. ESG has been reset, not abandoned, and gas infrastructure is once again being embraced, often relabelled as energy transition to make it palatable. Datacenters sit at the centre of everything, hoovering up capital and pulling renewables and grid infrastructure along with them.

The discussion goes straight at the hard questions: are genuinely new sectors emerging, can today’s giants realistically keep getting bigger, and is there still room for ultra-specialised strategies?

The answer is increasingly clear. Bigger is not automatically better. Investors are becoming far more selective, and many are shifting capital toward focused, mid-market funds that offer expertise rather than sheer scale.

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Berlin Infrastructure Conference – 24 to 27/3
https://www.peievents.com/en/checkout/?peievcc-event-id=113021

Link to Nat Bullard – 200 pages yearly deck
https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations