Multiple tailwinds are helping to drive growth for the infrastructure category. From 2021 to 2024, the private infrastructure market grew at a pace of roughly 11.5% per year, based on data from Preqin. Growth could accelerate, according to Goldman Sachs Research, potentially returning close to the 16% to 17% annualized rate that prevailed for much of the decade from 2012 to 2021. If this comes to pass, total private infrastructure fund assets under management (AUM) could exceed $3 trillion by 2030.
How much do hyperscalers plan to spend on data centers?
The scope and scale of planned AI-related capital expenditures have grown immensely. Goldman Sachs Research’s equity analysts expect a combined $5.3 trillion in capital spending from 2025 through 2030 by the large technology companies that are leading the buildout. This tally continues to climb: It stood at $4.5 trillion prior to first-quarter earnings reports.
Lynam’s team has previously highlighted that AI-related financing needs are significant enough that borrowers are tapping options in different markets, ranging from investment-grade debt to private asset markets, across a variety of structures and in different currencies.
Because of their ambitious AI-related capital expenditures, the hyperscalers already account for a large share of new corporate borrowing. They may face market saturation constraints as public debt investors absorb ever-larger amounts of debt from the same handful of issuers (thereby increasing their weights in widely tracked corporate bond indices), or as some investors become less willing to buy the securities because of portfolio concentration limits.
“We expect liquid credit market saturation and issuer concentration constraints to become somewhat more binding in coming years,” Lynam writes. While the magnitude of such constraints is “still heavily debated,” the report says, these issues will at the very least impact nuanced decisions around exposure and pricing, according to Goldman Sachs Research. This is why the ability of the private markets to play a meaningful role in AI-related financing is so important.
How is private capital being used in data center financing?
The lines between private market infrastructure and real estate funds have been blurring. That’s because different aspects of data center financing—including land, operational networks, power, buildings, and equipment—touch different asset classifications. Over the past decade, digital infrastructure funds have increasingly been categorized in the infrastructure group, rather than in real estate.
What matters more than category names, though, is the combined long-term financing capacity across both fund types, Lynam writes.
Private infrastructure funds had just over $1.7 trillion in AUM as of September 2025, including almost $400 billion of uninvested dry powder available to be deployed, based on Preqin data. The private real estate market is even larger, with $2.1 trillion AUM, including $600 billion of dry powder.
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