'Dawning of infrastructure' to fuel economic growth, says BlackRock's CEO

financialpost.com:

BlackRock Inc. chief executive Larry Fink said infrastructure is a major component to help stimulate growth in every economy and there’s enough capital in the private sector to fund investment.

“To me, this is the dawning of infrastructure,” he told Bloomberg Television’s Francine Lacqua in an interview Tuesday on the sidelines of the Berlin Global Dialogue 2024 conference.

“When I look around the world today, I see the inadequacies of infrastructure in almost every country,” he added. “So we need to be decarbonizing, we need to be digitizing, we need to be moving forward, we need to be building out more and more and I think this is one of the big issues.”

The world’s largest asset manager, which oversaw about US$10.6 trillion in assets as of June, has been pushing aggressively into infrastructure financing as it also grows the lucrative asset class of private markets. It has gone on a buying spree, announcing acquisitions this year of Global Infrastructure Partners for US$12.5 billion, a deal that’s closing Tuesday, and the purchase of alternatives data-provider Preqin.

Last month, BlackRock said it was teaming up with Microsoft Corp. and others, seeking to raise US$30 billion of private equity capital over time to bankroll the build-out of data warehouses and energy infrastructure behind the boom in artificial intelligence.

Fink also pointed out that beyond the equity component, they will be raising as much as US$120 billion in debt associated with those data centres.

“Infrastructure is a major component on how we stimulate growth and because of the breadth of the capital markets we don’t have to rely on federal spending or state spending,” he said in the interview. “There is enough capital in the private sector that