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A
Hi, I'm Bruno Alvis, Editor in chief of Infrastructure Investor and welcome to the Infrastructure Investor Podcast. In today's episode, I sit down with Zach Bentley, Infrastructure Investors America's editor. Zach and I do a deep dive into the Latest Infrastructure Investor 100 ranking of the world's largest managers and discuss what it tells us about the evolving shape of the global infrastructure market. With a total of $1.2 trillion raised over the last five years, the numbers point to a strong recovery. But they also highlight just how concentrated the industry has become, with a handful of large cap managers commanding the lion's share of capital. We also unpack our latest quarterly data on fund performance, highlighting the dispersion between top and bottom quartile funds. The challenge is infrastructure's reputation is a consistently defensive asset class. Finally, we touch on how strategies are evolving to reflect the digital capex super cycle we find ourselves in. Hi Zach, good to see you. Welcome back on the podcast.
B
Hi Bruno. Thank you, thank you.
A
So we've got a fair amount of ground to cover on this podcast. We've just released basically a slew of content on our side, encompassing rankings, but also our latest quarterly performance report. And I thought this would be a great time to go through some of these pieces and maybe pick out some of the highlights for the benefit of our audience. And I think maybe the obvious place to start is with our Infrastructure Investor 100 ranking, which basically tracks the largest 100 infrastructure equity GPs in the world. We look at funds raised over a five year period. In this case, the period in question is the 1st of January 2021 to the 31st of December 2025. So this is very much not an AUM ranking and we could all have a grown up discussion about whether that's better or worse. But we feel that fundraising keeps things a bit fresher with a five year period. So we've got a new one out, just recently published, basically showing a total of 1.2 trillion DOL raised over the past five years by the top 100 managers. And just to frame that figure a little bit for our audience, this is actually a bit of a comeback after what was a record fundraising year in 2025. Basically for people to have an idea, the 2024 edition of our ranking, which tracked funds raised up until the end of 2023 that had raised $1.1 trillion, then the 2025 edition had actually gone down to a trillion dollars and now we are back up to 1.2 trillion. So I guess first thing to say, Zach, all of this kind of to be expected. Right. In terms of what we saw, in terms of the fundraising bounce back in 2025.
B
Yeah, certainly. Also, I think the figures that you just mentioned also reflect the highs and lows that we have seen over the last five years. So, as you say, not an AUM ranking, and probably the best way to chart the fortunes or otherwise of this asset class recently.
A
Yeah. And just to walk listeners through some of the headline changes, you know, we always have a bit of shuffling in the top 10. This year is no different. So we have BlackRock on top, thanks to the latest fundraising from Global Infrastructure Partners. We. We actually have KKR climbing from number three to number two. This year, we have Brookfield dropping from number one to number three. So a bit of a shuffling in the top 10. There are other changes, but I find that, you know, one thing that seems to be becoming more or less permanent is listeners that are familiar with the II 100 will probably remember that Macquarie held the top spot for 13 years. They've lost that top spot in 2024, and they have been consigned to fourth place ever since. And that is something that doesn't seem like it will be changing, I guess. What do you think, Zach?
B
Yeah, I think that's symptomatic of the way that Macquarie raises capital. As readers will well know, they have European funds, Asia funds, America's funds. And so I guess if you're a Brookfield, KKR or GIP and you're raising in a global context, you're more likely to rise in this ranking. But I think Macquarie also may be somewhat different from some others in this list, where, you know, they do have adjacent strategies and renewables and Super Core, But I think those are a smaller part of the business compared to some of the others you see in that top 10, where it seems like every GP has four different strings to their bows. And increasingly so, you know, people have a flagship and a transition fund and an AI fund and core fund. And so I think that's also what's really driving this top 10 here.
A
Yeah, this is actually a good place to zoom in on, because you're right to single out Macquarie and say they're a little bit unique in the way they go about it compared to kind of the product lines of some of the other ones. And we have a few things to kind of note about the top 10. One of them is that this year, the only specialist manager in the top 10 is actually DigitalBridge, which is who's fallen to seventh from sixth place last year. They're obviously Digital infrastructure focused now you could say increasingly also power focused following the recent acquisition of ArcLight, but they're still the only specialists there. And then we have also Blackstone, which this year are sitting at number eight, unchanged from last year with about 46 billion raised. And that is primarily if not only via their flagship open ended fund. And I think other people in this top 10 may have open ended funds, but they are not usually the flagship. So that's also something that catches the eye.
B
Yeah, I think on that sector specialist point I would zero in even further. I think for all we talk about digital infrastructure and energy and energy transition as drivers of deal flow, right now in the top 15 you've still got only two sector specialists in digital bridge, as you mentioned, and ECP. You then have to go to number 30 to get the next sector specialist in Schroder's Greenco. But then I think as you get further into our ranking, that's where it starts to get interesting. I think from 46 to 55 on the II100 we have seven either digital or energy sector specialists. So I think as you get further into that broader mid market level, that's where that specialism starts to arise.
A
Yes, and I would just add quickly that you left out Copenhagen Infrastructure partners in the top 15. Top 20 there indeed, currently sitting at number 11. But everything else you've said holds up, up. And I think this is really kind of also about what the top 10 represents in terms of size and concentration. So this is not the first time this has happened, won't be the last time. There's a lot of concentration in our II 100 ranking. This year the top 10 has raised about 56% of the ranking. So basically, to give you a figure, that's around 670 billion of the 1.2 trillion raised. So all of that is the doing of the top 10 and the rest has been raised by the other 90 GPs not in the top 10. So this is highly concentrated. I think, Zach, that top 10 is also very, very representative of the large cap, wouldn't you say? I mean this is where not exclusively there's a bit of the large cap seeping outside of the top 10, but the top 10 really represents those managers with the capacity to raise large cap strategies, right?
B
Yeah, I think it's that, but it's also, it goes to the point before of the adjacent strategies. So much of this is driven by the flagships, but increasingly we see those large cap managers having the capacity to raise smaller funds. And so I'm sure mid Market GP will turn around to us and tell us that they don't feel like their lunch is being eaten, but I think the figures that we're seeing here do somewhat show that.
A
Yeah, well, and the funny thing is, yes, you're right, they're kind of going after everything. They're going after the specialization, they're going after the smaller mid market segment, but they are definitely cornering the large cap segment. And I don't mean that just in the flagship sense, or maybe I do, but what I mean is some of the new AI infrastructure focused products can be tracked almost exclusively, I would say, to the managers that sit within this top 10. So I'm thinking about the GIP, Blackrocks of the world, the Brookfields EQ team. I'm not quite sure what KKR is doing end of the day with what we keep hearing about their foray into the AI infrastructure sector. But again, the names are the people within the top 10. So they're not only going after the mid market guys in a way, but they are making sure that nobody kind of seeps into that large cap product category, isn't it?
B
Yeah, yeah. But I would also say that within all those AI funds we see various different options and strategies. We see the open end approach from GIP and EQT and then we see the more closed end, the more technology adjacent strategy from Brookfield. And so I think investors who want to go down that route do have options that are slightly differentiated.
A
Yeah. I think another interesting thing about the top 10, which in a certain way is also representative of the larger ranking. But if you look at the top 10, seven of the managers on it are headquartered in the US, two of them are headquartered in Europe and then I think one of them is headquartered in Australia. And actually when you zoom out and you look at the ranking, North America headquartered GPs actually account for 636 billion of the capital raised, which is about half of this year's addition, basically. So that is also kind of an interesting. I mean the weight of the North American GPS is just. They own the ranking, I think it's fair to say.
B
Yeah. And then I think actually when you scroll down that list and you look sort of within the top 20, 25, that's where the European headquarters and managers really come into their.
A
Yeah, and by the way, the European firms, the managers, excluding the uk, they came in really at a distant second. So they raised about 285 billion of the 1.2 trillion that makes up this year's ranking. So it's really, it is very much the definition of a distant second here.
B
I do just want to put in that we're talking about all of this capital being raised by the large cap managers and how it seems to be growing larger, that gap. Some recent news of EQT, which last week said that they'd be targeting 21 billion for their seventh infrastructure fund. That's actually below what they closed on for Fund 6 of 21.5 billion euros. And so maybe there's a recognition by some of those managers of this gap growing and also the fact that they do have so many infrastructure funds in market and maybe just kind of stepping back a little and seeing that the market isn't booming when it comes to fundraising. It's healthy, but it's not booming. And kind of just tempering expectations a little bit.
A
Yeah, I think that's exactly that. That's prudent expectation management, isn't it, on their part. And I think some of the larger managers, certainly within this top 10, have followed that direction. Most of them are not meaningfully increasing their target sizes, if at all. Right. They're keeping within familiar kind of thresholds, I guess.
B
We've also seen blockbill go from 25 billion to 30 billion in that respect.
A
Yeah, well, that's true. We also published our placement agent rankings. This one is clearly dominated, perhaps to no one's surprise in this industry, by Campbell Lutyens. But I wanted to highlight one of the points that Richard Moore, which is their head of EMEA infrastructure, made to us, and it goes to this expectation management that you were just saying. But he was basically saying that there are some 700 infrastructure funds out there seeking almost 600 billion. But he was seeing the flow of capital remaining quite robust. And actually probably in some good news for managers, the processes now were moving in a way that they weren't necessarily doing two to three years ago, which I think tracks what we kind of been picking up anecdotally.
B
Right, yeah. And just to add to that, I think one of Richard's other comments was that he said that the first and final closes are the ones that are driving LP focus. And.
A
Absolutely.
B
I think we've written about this before, maybe spoken about this before on the podcast, but it's just worth noting that lots of GPS at the moment have, I don't want to say little to no trouble, but they have comfort in getting to first closes roundabout, either half the fund or roundabout to the size that they previously were on the previous fund. And then you start to see quite a lengthy period from first close to final close. And that's where really the hard work of getting the LP capital in, in a somewhat constrained environment is happening for gps. And I think that's what Richard is alluding to.
A
Yeah, yeah, that's really spot on there. I think if I look at this, my kind of takeaway really is that infrastructure is increasingly in a way a large cap game because in terms of the check sizes and whatnot and the amount of capital raised, it funnels upwards to that top 10. But the overwhelming majority of managers by the numbers are obviously mid market, lower mid market and likely to remain. And the reason I'm kind of stating the obvious here is that I feel that, and we can get into this a little bit further down in the podcast, but this year more than ever, when we were at our global summit in Berlin, the large cap versus mid market discussion was very, very alive. And there was almost like a very concerted campaign by the mid market to kind of, you know, draw attention to what could be the pitfalls of large caps. Who are they going to exit to? Maybe they perform slightly worse. So I find this, you know, this is quite an interesting moment to be spotlighting this concentration.
B
Yeah. And it feels like we have been having this discussion for a while. Maybe at next year's global summit we could have maybe more of a ringside event with a large cap and a mid cap and let them battle it out on their own.
A
Do you mean an actual fight?
B
You know, everyone we've got sometimes for the next global summit, if you submit some ideas, we can consider them all.
A
Yep, it's a large venue, we can probably host that.
B
But yeah, I think we've got our July August cover story coming soon which will be focusing on that mid market advantage that you often hear GPS talking about and the superior returns and spoiler alert. Yes, there are superior returns, but an asterisk comes with all of that. Just as you're saying that there is a huge, huge mid market out there and so it's selection of managers is crucial.
A
Yeah, well, I think there's two things actually. One is, let's say you acknowledge that. Like you're saying spoiler alert. That seems to be true. I think for some institutions you're just almost constitutionally unable to go there. Right. Because you've got a big check you need to write and you're just not going to be able to write it for most mid market funds, if not all of them. Right. So you kind of, you're kind of taken out of there even if you wanted to take part or it's going to be hard for you. Right. And that is the reality I feel here in infrastructure.
B
Yeah, yeah. And I think for every lp, sort of the processes that it takes to write some of those checks varies and it will also depend on how they're able to execute.
A
But the second part of what you said, I think that's very interesting because. And that ties in precisely to another piece of research we've recently published, which was kind of our second quarterly performance report. And this time we looked at what is kind of the gulf between top and bottom quartile gps. Now I'm not in any way suggesting that it is news that there is dispersion in performance in infrastructure because infrastructure is part of private markets in the financial world. So of course you would. But I think what gets interesting here has to do with the way that infrastructure is marketed, which to LPs is kind of marketed as the quintessential defensive asset class. You got your stable inflation protected cash flows, low correlation with wider market, a heightened level of resilience, yada yada, yada. So what struck me here is that while most top quartile Funds comfortably exceed 1x DPI, so you get your money back and then some over the lifetime when you go to the bottom quartile, you have a lot of funds across strategies below 1x even after several years, even at year 12, kind of indicating that you may either not get your money back in the worst case scenarios or you certainly might not get the return that you were promised. And I don't know, I found that dispersion very, very interesting. What do you make of that, Zach?
B
Yeah, it's something that has come up a lot in the conversations for this July August cover that yes, there is an advantage to being in mid market, but it's really where, where your decisions could live or die. The amount of dispersion in performance in mid market is as you say, it's, it's surprising for, for an asset class that promises certain things. So I think, you know, track record is, is often spoken about almost in a cliche like manner, but it really, it really does matter. If you can see someone's had three, four, five fans and, and they kind of broadly look similar in terms of figures versus when you're on a fund too. Can you trust some, some of these things? I think there's also an element that we've written about beforehand that for either this, this really sticks out for sector specialist funds. But I think this can also affect generalist funds that what you were doing Maybe two funds ago isn't the same anymore. Yeah, I think, you know, the digital infrastructure and energy landscape really, really change those things. And so it's not necessarily the same playbook as it was before.
A
Yeah, I think that's crucial because at the speed at which things are changing, you really have to update your skill set or make sure that you have the right one. And I think maybe for the managers themselves, but certainly for LPs, it can be a little bit hard to maybe move quick enough to get behind the changes that are needed. And I think what these numbers show is you pick wrongly in infrastructure and it goes wrong. The asset class's defensiveness does not automatically shine through, which means you really will have to pick. And all of this is happening at a period when the asset class is changing, as you rightly pointed out, but also at a point where maybe people are getting pushed, and by people, I mean managers, into building more. Right. Whether it's energy, whether it's digital, whether it's both, people are much more in the game of building platforms, developing, et cetera, than probably they wanted to a few years ago.
B
Yeah. I think many of our listeners will be old enough to remember when the word greenfield would get stuck on a fund name to make sure that people knew that this would be building stuff. I think those days are long gone. And if you're driving value, everyone has to be doing some element of building in greenfield to the trash.
A
And, you know, in this sense, I think the recent acquisition of ArcLight, a storied power veteran by Digital Bridge, is kind of a good example of acquiring the skill set that is needed. I mean, if you listen to our last episode of the Infrastructure Investor podcast, and it featured Mark Ganzi, the CEO of Digital Bridge and in segments of it. I mean, when he's talking about power and arbitrage and what you can do with it, he sounds very much like a power developer. And he acknowledged that they have had to become a power developer and now they've scaled up even further. Right. So I wonder if we are going to see more of this scaling up, as it were.
B
Yeah, but I think that's also. I think we probably will see more of that. I think what people have to be wary of, it's an issue that we've touched on a few times recently, is the public backlash that even just the perception, you know, you have a firm like ArcLight, which for years has been building assets for the grids and servicing grids across the U.S. the perception of being bought by Digital Bridge, which is also now a subsidiary of SoftBank, the perception this is all to service AI infrastructure and data center infrastructure. We've written a lot about the public backlash that's happening in the reg shoe backlash, and it just might be one of those things that also gets added to the list.
A
Yeah, that is very true, Zach. What else? Is there anything else that has caught your eye about either our recent content pieces or what you've been picking up in the market that is worth bringing up?
B
Well, I mean, just to go back to the Digital Bridge ArcLight deal, obviously it says several things about what's happening in that part of the market right now, but I also just it did bring back to mind the COVID story we did in April 2024 after a wave of GP consolidations, and it brought to mind some comments. I think some were made Brent Burnett from Hamilton Lane and others that when these deals happen, sometimes they're done after a final close of a fund was announced, as happened in the case of Architect, where they closed the fund in April and the acquisition by Digital Bridge was announced in June. And how that sometimes ruffles some LPs feathers when you're raising a fund and you're turning LPs of a certain strategy and then a consolidation deal gets announced. So yeah, it did bring to mind that, and readers can revisit that. But I think Brent's words were that sometimes this can come across a bit disingenuous. I don't know how the process was handled in the ArcLight case, but it is one to look out for.
A
Yeah, well, let's not forget that Digital Bridge itself is still in the process of concluding its acquisition by SoftBank, so there's an extra layer of acquisition within an acquisition going on here, so lots of space for LPs to air their opinions about where this is headed.
B
Well, it's also been done just after AGM season, so maybe next year, Zak,
A
I think that's a good place to end it on. And thanks again for coming on the podcast and I will talk to you soon.
B
Thank you, Bruno. Great to chat.
A
That again was Zach Bentley, Infrastructure Investors America's Editor, and I'm Bruno Alves, Editor in Chief of Infrastructure Investor. To hear more of our episodes, head over to InfrastructureInvestor.com podcast, where you can search and subscribe to the Infrastructure Investor podcast wherever you like to listen.
Episode: Infra’s $1.2trn Fundraising Comeback – But Who Really Wins?
Host: Bruno Alves (A), Editor-in-Chief, Infrastructure Investor
Guest: Zach Bentley (B), Editor, Infrastructure Investor Americas
Date: June 18, 2026
This episode explores the findings of the latest Infrastructure Investor 100 (II 100) ranking, which tracks the world's largest infrastructure equity managers by fundraising, as well as the sector’s latest quarterly fund performance data. With a staggering $1.2 trillion raised in the past five years, Bruno and Zach unpick the industry’s post-pandemic "comeback," the increasing concentration among giant GPs (General Partners), and the notable performance dispersion between top and bottom quartile funds. The conversation also examines large-cap versus mid-market dynamics, evolving strategies in response to the digital infrastructure boom, and recent sector-defining deals such as DigitalBridge’s acquisition of ArcLight.
Dominance of Major Players
Product Lines & Strategies
Sector Specialists: Few at the Top
Geographic Trends
Entrenchment of Large-Cap Power
Mid-Market Under Pressure, But With Opportunities
Performance Dispersion
Plateauing Targets
Fundraising Process Shift
Rise of Platform Building and ‘Greenfield’ Development
DigitalBridge/ArcLight Case: Power + Digital Convergence
Public Perception Challenges
LP Tensions with Consolidation Moves
On Concentration:
“This is highly concentrated… the top 10 really represent those managers with the capacity to raise large cap strategies.” – Bruno, [07:16]
On Manager Differentiation:
“So much of this is driven by the flagships, but increasingly we see those large cap managers having the capacity to raise smaller funds… the figures… do somewhat show that.” – Zach, [08:19]
On Performance Risk:
“Track record is often spoken about almost in a cliché like manner, but it really does matter.” – Zach, [18:17]
On Digital Bridge’s Strategy:
“They have had to become a power developer and now they’ve scaled up even further.” – Bruno, [20:36]
On Fundraising Pace:
“They have comfort in getting to first closes… and then you start to see quite a lengthy period from first close to final close. And that’s where really the hard work… in a somewhat constrained environment is happening.” – Zach, [13:32]
Bruno and Zach leave listeners with the sense that infrastructure investing is at an inflection point—dominated by a powerful few, but with notable performance variation and public scrutiny intensifying as strategies evolve rapidly. The mid-market may offer superior returns for the savvy, but picking winners is harder than ever.
For more episodes, visit infrastructureinvestor.com/podcast.