New Segment: Infrastructure and Data Centers: The Standout Opportunity

Section II: Opportunities for LPs · from The State of Private Equity, Part 2B: Challenges and Opportunities for LPs.

Infrastructure was the standout fundraising story of 2025. The strategy raised nearly $200 billion, even as private equity and venture capital continued to face fundraising headwinds; six of the ten largest private capital funds closed globally in 2025 were infrastructure vehicles, and the top three infrastructure funds alone accounted for more than a third of the year's total.²² Bain's fundraising data tells the same story: infrastructure fundraising grew 58% year-over-year in 2025, even as buyout fundraising fell 16%.²³

Chart in the full report — source: SEB²²

Not surprisingly, much of the growth came from AI-adjacent demand. Digital infrastructure linked to AI, such as data centers, power generation, and grid connectivity, has emerged as a distinct allocation theme, offering investors infrastructure-like risk and return with exposure to the AI capex cycle. As we discussed in the software-sector challenge in Section I, this is the flip side of that story: capital rotating toward asset-heavy businesses. Half of 2025's infrastructure capital was raised in North America, with a further 40% from European managers, and dry powder grew only modestly to $417 billion even as deployment activity kept pace with inflows, a sign that capital is being put to work rather than stockpiled.²²

Chart in the full report — source: Bain²³