After two stop-start years for dealmakers, private infrastructure is back in full swing. The asset class is not only weathering the broader alternatives slowdown but emerging as one of its most powerful growth engines. 

Fundraising into private infrastructure surged nearly 60% last year, pushing assets under management to a record $1.6 trillion through the first half of 2025 and lifting the asset class to 10% of all private market capital, according to Boston Consulting Group’s fifth annual report on infrastructure, A Year of Increasing Scale and Diversification, 

Investors have gravitated toward core-plus and value-added strategies, even as other alternative categories, including private equity, grapple with declining inflows. Since 2015, infrastructure fundraising has climbed roughly 44%, versus a 14% drop in private equity capital raised over the same period. 

The trend is a follow-through on what limited partners were already signaling a year ago, when 31% said they planned to increase their infrastructure allocations. BCG notes that sector fundraising has been compounding at about 14% annually despite softer deal volumes in 2024.  

Scale is increasingly decisive: the 50 largest infrastructure managers captured roughly 72% of allocations in 2025, and BCG expects mega-platforms to keep consolidating share while a cadre of specialists focuses on narrow subsectors and geographies. 

That capital is chasing a massive investment need. The World Economic Forum estimates that some $94 trillion must be deployed to upgrade and replace aging infrastructure by 2040, against a backdrop of demographic shifts, decarbonization, digitization, and deglobalization.  

In BCG’s sample, the top 50 infrastructure funds hold stakes in 1,612 companies, two-thirds of which are in Europe and the U.S. Energy and environment assets account for nearly half of portfolio companies over the past decade and about 65% of AUM. Digital infrastructure is the standout growth story, rising to almost 20% of portfolio companies, from 15% in 2020, with data centers leading the expansion. 

Rising compute demand is the key structural driver. BCG expects global energy demand to grow about 1% annually through 2050, even after accounting for efficiency gains, with electricity’s share of that demand increasing from 21% to 31%. That backdrop supports long-term appetite for renewables and grid assets, even as current margins tighten. The report highlights 10 emerging opportunity areas clustered in technology, services and asset pooling, agriculture, and manufacturing—segments that tend to offer high barriers to entry, inflation linkage, and resilient cash flows. 

Nowhere is the opportunity more visible than in data centers. BCG projects demand for computing power to grow in the high teens annually through 2030, up from roughly 11% to 12% per year previously, powered by the acceleration of generative and agentic AI layered on top of ongoing cloud and enterprise digitization.  

The firm sees “significant value” in continued build-out in Tier 1 U.S. hubs such as Northern Virginia and in Europe’s FLAP-D markets—Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin—where agglomeration effects around existing facilities, internet exchanges, and dense end-user bases create durable moats for scaled platforms.