All eyes are on the latest earnings report from Nvidia this week. The world’s largest chipmaker is worth nearly $5trn (€4.29trn) and is leading the AI revolution currently buoying stockmarkets. But it’s not just public markets that Nvidia has been affecting.
Earlier this month, the company announced that it had signed memorandums of understanding (MOU) with six major private markets investment firms to effectively make the financing of AI compute an investable asset class. The strategic partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR are intended to “mobilise over $500bn of third-party capital for the buildout of AI infrastructure over time”.
Nvidia has transformed itself from a niche company originally focused on developing graphics-processing units for video games to a tech giant, and now is moving into a role that some have dubbed the bank of AI. “We began by building chips,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang at the time of the MOU announcement. “Today, we are helping create a new class of productive, investable infrastructure: AI factories.”
KKR is among those to have signed an MOU. KKR teamed up previously with Nvidia this year, alongside the Kuwait Investment Authority and US electricity company Vistra, to launch Helix Digital Infrastructure. Helix is said to have about $10bn of “long-duration capital” and will invest in and operate AI-enabling infrastructure, with Nvidia providing the “technical architecture” and Vistra the power generation and energy transmission capabilities. KKR’s global head of digital infrastructure, Waldemar Szlezak, has become Helix’s chief investment officer.
KKR also hit the headlines recently with the announcement that it had raised its largest-ever infrastructure fund, raising nearly $20bn for Global Infrastructure Investor V. The final close for this fund has helped the New York private equity giant reach about $120bn in infrastructure assets under management – up from $13bn in 2019. KKR placed fifth in IPE Real Assets’ recent ranking of the 100 largest infrastructure investment managers – up from 19th in 2019.
KKR Global Infrastructure Investor V has invested in data centre companies Global Technical Realty and Gulf Data Hub. KKR is also a joint owner – alongside BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners – of CyrusOne, one of the world’s largest developers and operators of data centres.
Earlier this year, KKR’s global head of real assets, Raj Agrawal, told IPE Real Assets that this huge period of growth in infrastructure was down to doing “two things right” – “protecting capital at all costs” through downside protection, and “adding value in everything that we do”.
But the emphasis on capital protection also applies to the heady growth area of data centres. “It’s clearly one of the most substantial investment needs and investment opportunities that we’ve seen,” Agrawal said. “[But] large does not always mean attractive. The demand is real, the outlook for growth is real – at least in the next two-to-four-year period [during which] we have a lot of conviction and visibility as to the growth from the key hyperscale customers.”
Where next for infrastructure fundraising?
Another notable capital raise this year has involved Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP), which secured $3bn for its latest growth markets fund. Whereas KKR’s new fund invests in core-plus infrastructure mostly in the US and Europe, CIP’s Growth Markets Fund II targets energy projects in eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America. CIP also raised three times as more for the fund as it did for the predecessor.
Both KKR and CIP’s fund closes come at a time of relatively weak fundraising in infrastructure more broadly. After a record year in 2025, infrastructure fundraising has been slow in the first six months of 2026. With Intelligence has reported a record-low H1, with 31 funds raising $43.4bn, while Preqin said 17 funds raised $23bn in Q1 adding that Q2 has weakened further.
Much of the future of infrastructure fundraising depends on institutional allocation trends and appetite for investments amid an increasingly competitive private markets landscape. Last year, IPE Real Assets’s annual survey of investors, revealed that institutions have built up significant exposure to infrastructure and are now looking to consolidate their positions in the asset class. Among those that disclosed their target allocations, the average target weighing to infrastructure was 7.7% – 70bps above the average actual exposure of 7%.
Meanwhile, 58% of investors said they expected to invest or commit the same level of capital over the next 12 months as they had done over the previous year – while more than 30% expected to invest a greater volume.
Look out for the September/October issue of IPE Real Assets to see the results of this year’s survey. The results will be discussed in September at the annual IPE Real Assets Infrastructure & Natural Capital Global Conference & Awards in Munich on a panel that includes the UK’s Pension Protection Fund, Alberta Investment Management Corporation and Australia’s Aware Super.
To read the latest IPE Real Assets magazine click here.
