The demand for AI driving data centre construction might be “insatiable”, but the chief investment officer of the $115 billion UniSuper thinks that investors could be taking on technology debt and misreading the regulatory tea leaves as they rush to buy digital infrastructure.
The United Kingdom’s £31.4 billion ($39 billion) Pension Insurance Corporation, an insurance company specialising in securing the liabilities of defined benefit pension schemes, is growing its infrastructure allocation to renewables and student housing and pushing into new markets in the Ireland and Spain.
The EDHECinfra/G20 survey of infrastructure benchmarking practices, which included representatives of 130 asset owners accounting for $10 trillion, has found that existing performance monitoring benchmarks are self-defeating for asset owners and managers. But improvement, in the form of a more representative, better defined benchmark, may be possible thanks to recent progress.
Investors in infrastructure do know how much risk they are taking and they are not happy about it, according to the 2019 EDHECinfra/G20 survey. This is the first installment of a three part series examining the results according to asset allocation, monitoring and risk management.
A decade of price increases in unlisted infrastructure raised fears of an “infrastructure bubble”. On the contrary, this period was one of price discovery for a nascent asset class, research by EDHECinfra finds.
Organisations across the globe are collecting data, analysing and re-analysing it more and more every day. As this trend continues, data infrastructure – tangible or intangible – becomes increasingly attractive. Canada’s OPTrust cites this reality as the rationale behind the EdgeCore partnership. It thinks data is its own asset class.
The UK’s £45 billion Northern LGPS pool has eschewed creating a separate FCA-regulated entity, seeing it as an unnecessary expense. Moves in infrastructure and private equity have also reflected the asset pool’s laser-like focus on keeping costs down.
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Infrastructure