Private equity fundraising and deals are still in a slump and valuations are under pressure. But at the annual SuperReturn conference in Berlin, private market titans were giddy over the coming AI supercycle and the massive buildout of physical infrastructure it will require.
The buzz among fund managers and limited partners was the wave of mega-IPOs kicked off by SpaceX and the new era for private markets they portend.
“We are in a global industrial renaissance,” declared Scott Kleinman of Apollo Global Management. Trillions of dollars in capital will be needed for the digital infrastructure buildout and the concurrent energy transition, he said. Shifts in trade policy and geopolitical tensions are triggering a transformation of global supply chains around strategic resilience.
“We spent the last 40 years globalizing our economy, and we’re going to spend the next five or 10 years reglobalizing it,” Kleinman said. “Private capital has to play a huge part in this.”
Jeffrey Currie, a senior advisor to PE giant Carlyle, said some $10 trillion in investments in the US alone could shift in the coming decade from “asset-light” investments, such as software, to energy infrastructure, chips, robots and other physical assets. “We’re at the beginning of a decades-long rotation” to what Currie calls HALO – hard assets, local operation.
“I want to own the HALO assets,” he said.
The sprawling conference near Berlin’s zoo drew some 5,000 attendees, including GPs looking to raise capital and LPs scouting trends and investment opportunities. Side conferences focused on the energy transition, venture capital and European tech sovereignty. Big-think topics like abundance, scarcity and bottlenecks crowded out concerns about exits, interest rates and distributions to paid-in capital, or DPI, a measure of actual returns to investors (versus mere paper gains).
AI disruption
Anthropic’s warning that humans could soon lose control over increasingly capable AI systems could have cast a pall over the gathering. The trillion-dollar AI startup suggested that humans may want the option of a temporary global pause on frontier model development to give them time to assess. Such warnings were mostly ignored as attendees focused on business model disruption and the wealth about to be unleashed by the IPOs of Anthropic and its rival OpenAI.
“It’s like a boiling frog,” said one fund manager, referring to the willingness of many investors to overlook the existential risk posed by AI.
An exception was former Vice President Al Gore, who called out governance as a pressing area that needs more attention and argued that AI has become a sustainability issue.
“We really have to face up to the fact that this technology is advancing so quickly that it is going to challenge not only business models but societal models, civilization models, cultural models,” Gore said at a session with his Generation Investment Management colleagues David Blood and Lila Preston. “How do we govern the impact that AI is already beginning to have, and how do we guard against the use of AI to make deadly biological weapons?”
Gore was hopeful that a bilateral agreement on responsible AI between the two AI superpowers is possible. China, he noted, is also nervous about where AI is headed. The starting point for an agreement, as Gore sees it: frontier model developers should be required to publish the constitutions that govern their advanced models, as Anthropic has done. “Let it be public, let it be debated. If it needs to be amended, let’s have at that as well.”
Other worries centered on the impact AI is having on portfolios, especially those filled with software companies that for years generated oodles of cash from their near-zero marginal cost models. The so-called “SaaSpocalypse” has already wiped billions from the valuations of software-as-a-service companies. With every week, AI seems to absorb whole new categories.
“AI might be one of the most massive repricings that we’ve seen in the history of technology,”
said Seth Bannon of Silicon Valley-based deep tech investor Fifty Years. AI is making the creation of software “abundant and nearly free,” he said. “We are entering an age where basically all software will be written on the fly, by foundation models for the person in real time.”
The software companies that can survive must have either genuinely unique data, human network effects, embedded trust, or regulatory advantages, he said. But the broader commodification of software is driving a shift to capital-intensive physical assets, such as chips and energy.
New joule order
Energy security trumped climate concerns at a two-day energy transition side conference. The event drew fewer LPs than in past years, and the family offices and other investors that showed up unabashedly made clear that oil and gas are part of the mix. But renewable energy sources for electricity have inherent advantages.
Carlyle’s Currie used the forum to expound on his theory of change, which he dubbed the New Joule Order in a widely read essay. The energy transition, he argues, will be driven not by climate concerns, but by the desire for energy security and a diversified energy mix of “joules,” or units of electrical energy. An electron can be sourced from gas, sun, wind, or uranium.
“A combustion engine is married to a single fuel that must cross someone else’s chokepoint,” he wrote in that essay. “Electrification is the purchase of optionality.”
China gets it, Currie said. Even as it continues to use coal, China is building out nuclear power, renewables and batteries. “So that [energy] goes to zero marginal cost, and AI becomes infinitely scalable. And isn’t this all one big AI race to begin with?”
In Europe, energy security is driving a surge in renewable energy projects. “Renewable energy is not just a cost center anymore. It’s strategic, it’s about how you create stability, availability, redundancy, and security,” said Par Lindstrom of i(x) Net Zero, a growth capital investment company focused on renewable energy.
The continent has been deploying massive amounts of wind, solar and other renewables to wean itself off of imported oil and gas. The question now is “how do we integrate renewables into the grid?” said Olena Reznik of sustainable investment firm Mirova. The energy transition, she said, “gives rise to a whole new investable universe,” including grid technology, storage and EV charging.
European sovereignty
The conversation in Europe focused on sovereignty — in tech, energy and defense. Europe’s path to sovereignty and sustainability lies in technologies that drive both decarbonization and resilience: clean energy, industrial innovation, critical materials and advanced computing, argued Danijel Višević, a general partner at World Fund, one of Europe’s largest VC firms, which held its annual investor meeting alongside SuperReturn.
World Fund’s analysis of publicly available data found that these power-critical sectors represent a market opportunity of more than $35 trillion by 2030.
“This is our path back to power. The technologies that can fix Europe’s dependencies are the same that will create the next generation of European industrial champions,” Višević said.
Defense, as well, has been reframed as a security and sovereignty issue in Europe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; at SuperReturn, weapons development was also pitched as a driver of innovation and an energy transition accelerant.
“Obviously we all hate wars, but I must say that it has provided our strategy a lot of tailwinds,” Frederic De Mevius of Planet First Partners, said at an energy and technology panel at SuperReturn Venture. The UK-based growth equity firm invests in technologies that generate strong returns alongside positive environmental and social impact, including deeptech and sustainable technology for cities.
“We were in the energy transition from Day One,” said De Mevius. “All the businesses we’ve invested in are doing well, and we’re starting to see exit opportunities, large groups looking at some of our assets and finding value in them. And so for us the cycle is in a very good moment for energy transition.”
A defense panel featuring three former armed forces and intelligence veterans from Britain and the US explored the rapid mainstreaming of defense investing, its ethical complexity, and how LPs and founders should navigate the space.
Defense and dual-use investing has shifted from a niche, almost stigmatised corner of the market to a long-term trend, said the panelists, which included Eric Schlesinger of 201 Ventures, Nicola Sinclair of Twin Track Ventures and Hugo Jammes of EDT Ventures.
Defense investing “is now a structural trend”, according to Jammes, a former officer in the British Army whose UK-based VC backs dual-use tech startups. “For Europe specifically, you’re talking about multi-decade transformation across the defense industrial base and, of course, the industrial base, and that’s obviously matched with historic levels of funding from the public side.”
Jörg Goschin, the CEO of KfW Capital, a Germany-backed fund of funds, said the need for sovereignty is changing the way it invests. After an investment policy shift in May 2025, the firm has expanded from deep tech and dual use technology to include weapons, and has broadened its mandate from the EU to include the UK, Norway and Switzerland.
Oscar Padres of the European Investment Fund said he expected to soon announce the first close of the second Defense Equity Facility, which is targeted at $17.5 billion, or 10 times bigger than its predecessor.
Defense has historically been a driver of innovation across many regions, Padres said. “I’m fully convinced that Europe is heading into a new era of big tech developments driven to a big extent by defense technology.”
Few people understand tech sovereignty better than Denis Gursky, a British-Ukrainian entrepreneur and investor and founding partner of 1991 Ventures who chaired the Tech Sovereignty event.
1991 Ventures, a London-based seed-stage VC fund backed by UK investors Venrex and Samos Investments, connects UK capital with high-impact tech founders from Ukraine and central and eastern Europe, with a focus on post-war innovation, defense tech, and economic resilience.
Gursky framed the debate over Europe’s defense sovereignty around who ultimately controls its defense capabilities and capital. The key question now, he told ImpactAlpha on the sidelines, is whether a new generation of defense companies being “built, subsidized, funded, and raised in Europe” will stay in Europe, rather than migrate to the US in search of growth capital.