The AI data center bet keeps getting bigger.
When asked on a recent earnings call how big the total market for digital infrastructure is, Blair Jacobson, co-president of private credit giant Ares, said it is a “multi-trillion-dollar market opportunity.”
Even excluding the hyperscalers’ own spending, Jacobson said there’s a $900 billion opportunity for third-party investment in data centers alone. And that’s all before factoring in GPU financing or the enormous power buildout needed to support AI.
The world’s biggest investors are responding accordingly. They’re putting larger and larger sums into the plumbing of the AI boom: the data centers, chips, and power. And more firms are launching new businesses to join the race to provide the physical basis for generative AI.
Across earnings calls this season, private-capital giants repeatedly highlighted how central AI infrastructure has become to their strategies.
They’re also increasingly focused on other angles on the AI bet, partnering with Anthropic and OpenAI to create AI-native consulting firms and even touting their venture stakes in those AI giants, which could go public in the coming years.
Blackstone President Jon Gray told CNBC this week that during the first quarter, “8 of the 10 best performing investments we had were in this space.”
“They were battery charging companies, they were energy companies, LLMs, and the data center space, obviously, has become very large,” Gray said.
Private capital is flooding the zone on the promise of an AI industrial revolution. Here’s what the latest earnings calls and conference appearances reveal about how the biggest firms are placing their bets.
The infrastructure plays
The world’s largest alternative asset manager is also taking a leading role in the infrastructure buildout.
Blackstone “has become the largest investor in AI-related infrastructure in the world,” CEO Steve Schwarzman said during the firm’s recent earnings call. It owns $150 billion in data centers globally, with an additional $160 billion in the development pipeline, and Schwarzman also touted that it is “the most active private investor in the utility sector” in recent years, with a portfolio that includes “the longest cross-country network of natural gas pipelines in the US.”
Blackstone also continued lending to data-center operator CoreWeave, anchoring an $8.5 billion loan that CoreWeave says is the first investment-grade rated financing for chips.
Competitors also touted their continued investments.
Blue Owl co-CEO Marc Lipschultz discussed its equity stake in Amazon’s $12 billion Louisiana data center as the fourth project above $10 billion in which Blue Owl “will play a critical role”. There’s “unprecedented demand for data center capacity,” Lipschultz said during the firm’s first-quarter earnings call.
On the debt side, Apollo president Jim Zelter pointed to $8 billion in financing across two data-center deals earlier this year as an example of the firm’s ability to finance massive investment-grade projects during its Wednesday earnings call.
Some are already taking home big gains from their data-center adjacent bets. KKR’s 2023 investment in data-center cooling firm Cool-It netted a 15 times return when Ecolab bought it for $4.75 billion earlier this year.
One of KKR’s best-performing investments ever, the sale also returned an average of $240,000 to the firm’s 640 employees as part of KKR’s broader employee-ownership initiatives.
And at Ares, its investments in modular nuclear reactor company X-Energy may soon pay off. The company went public with a $1 billion IPO late last month.
The transaction was the “largest equity offering ever for a nuclear company,” said CEO Michael Arougheti, with the firm’s roughly $100 million investment now worth nearly $700 million.
New angles
Some longtime participants are taking new approaches to the market.
Blackstone is launching a publicly traded company that will buy newly built hyperscale data centers. Blackstone’s data-center REIT, Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust, filed for an IPO on Monday and plans to raise $1.75 billion.
This company will help bring the private-market data center development bet to the public equity markets for the first time, providing an indication of how the public markets price these assets.
Blackstone is also invested in a partnership with Anthropic, Hellman and Friedman, and Goldman Sachs to launch an AI-native consulting business. This “McKinsey of AI” will help bring Anthropic’s technology and talent inside portfolio companies, spreading both the usage and importance.
These firms are also highlighting their earlier-stage investments in splashier firms.
Blackstone has launched a new division, Blackstone N1, to focus on AI investments and is taking over Blackstone’s previous growth-investing efforts. During the firms earnings call, president Jon Gray highlighted three investments the firm made in some of the most anticipated tech IPOs of the year: Anthropic, SpaceX, and OpenAI, as one place where the firm’s AI activity may pay off.
Sometimes, a lending relationship can lead to an equity stake. Blue Owl has made about 10 times its money on its SpaceX equity stake, said Lipschultz, after selling half of it at a $1.25 trillion valuation. The opportunity to make that equity investment was only possible because of the firm’s long-standing position as a lender to SpaceX.
“The reason we have that position is because we were one of the very earliest lenders to SpaceX,” Lipschultz said.
New Entrants
Many of the biggest players are raising new funds focused exclusively on the AI bet. Last year, Brookfield announced a $10 billion inaugural AI infrastructure fund, while Ares is currently fundraising for its global data center equity fund.
Other firms are looking to build their own data centers through soon-to-be-built companies.
KKR is planning to launch a $10 billion company to develop and operate data centers and related power assets for hyperscalers, Bloomberg recently reported. Adam Selipsky, former CEO of Amazon Web Services, will be the venture’s CEO, and KKR’s head of digital infra Waldemar Szlezak, will be CIO.
At Milken on Monday, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said the firm would soon announce a partnership with an unnamed hyperscaler to build data centers, though no details have yet emerged.
Hedge fund Coatue, which invests in both startups and tech funds, is now jumping into the development frenzy too, with a venture to buy land for data centers. The firm, Next Frontier, is already buying land in Indiana for a data center. Coatue has previously been involved in GPU-financing deals with CoreWeave alongside Blackstone.
Also speaking at the Milken conference, Apollo’s Zelter said the sheer scale of the opportunity has created room for everyone.
“It’s a big ocean,” Zelter said, noting that firms now work closely together — including with longtime rivals like Blackstone’s Jon Gray. That marks a sharp shift from the financial crisis era, when “we were all very brutal competitors.”