The evolution of infrastructure investing

Infrastructure investing is expanding beyond traditional essential assets, requiring institutions to build broader portfolios aligned with specific income, growth and diversification objectives.

• From 2020 to 2025, private infrastructure delivered an average quarterly return of 1.0% when global equities were negative, versus -6.7% for global equities and -3.6% for global bonds.
• During above-average inflation, private infrastructure returned 4.0% on average per quarter, compared with 1.2% for global equities and -2.1% for global bonds; its correlation with global equities was 42.9%.
• Digitalization has expanded the opportunity set from towers and fiber to data centers, cloud infrastructure, AI compute capacity and the power systems supporting it, while decarbonization and deglobalization are driving investment in energy, supply chains and data sovereignty.
• Global infrastructure assets under management grew from $135 billion in 2008 to $1.7 trillion in 2025 and are forecast by Preqin to reach $2.9 trillion in 2030; infrastructure investment needs through 2040 are estimated at approximately $100 trillion.
• Institutional investors remain concentrated in core and core-plus strategies, although 46% say they are underallocated to infrastructure; debt and structured equity can add seniority, contractual income and downside protection alongside equity exposure.

Takeaway: Investors should define the portfolio role of infrastructure first, then combine debt, core, core-plus, value-add and opportunistic strategies according to income, growth, liquidity, governance and diversification needs, while recognizing that private-market index data have coverage, reporting-lag, valuation and survivorship limitations.