Brookfield Launches $100B AI Infrastructure Strategy With Nvidia, KIA

Asset management giant Brookfield has unveiled a $100 billion global AI infrastructure strategy in partnership with chip titan Nvidia and the Kuwait Investment Authority.

Brookfield Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Fund launched Wednesday with a target of $10 billion in equity commitments, the partners said in a release. BAIIF has received $5 billion in capital commitments from institutional and industry investors including Toronto-based Brookfield, Silicon Valley’s Nvidia and KIA, the Kuwaiti sovereign fund.

With further capital from its co-investors and additional financing, BAIIF aims to acquire up to $100 billion in AI infrastructure assets at every stage of the value chain, from energy and land to data centres and compute tech, according to the announcement.

“AI is creating one of the largest infrastructure buildouts in history, comparable to the formation of the modern power grid and global telecom networks, but unfolding at a far greater pace and significantly larger scale,” said Brookfield head of AI infrastructure Sikander Rashid. “This buildout will require $7 trillion of capital in the next 10 years across the entire AI value chain including power, compute, data centres, and beyond.”

Powering the Transformation

Brookfield said BAIIF will focus on investing in the physical infrastructure assets that underpin the delivery of artificial intelligence models, including AI factories designed around Nvidia’s new chip set launching next year, known as Vera Rubin.

AI factories differ from traditional data centres in their ability to train and generate AI models, as opposed to basic store-and-serve tasks. Nvidia, led by founder and CEO Jensen Huang, is the world’s largest maker of graphics processing units — the high-performance chips that power AI and data centre computing — and on Wednesday the group beat views with a 62 percent year-on-year surge in Q3 revenue to $57 billion.

“AI is transforming every industry, and like electricity, it will require every nation to build the infrastructure to power it,” Huang said. “AI infrastructure demands land, power, and purpose-built supercomputers — and our partnership with Brookfield brings all of these elements together in a ready-to-deploy AI cloud.”

Brookfield recently secured a seed investment for BAIIF with the announcement of a $5 billion framework deal with fuel cell maker Bloom Energy to install up to 1 gigawatt of behind-the-meter power solutions for data centres and AI factories, referring to the systems that generate or store electricity on-site to reduce grid dependence.

Digital Dealmaking

KIA, the $1 trillion-plus sovereign giant founded in Kuwait City in 1953, is upping its bets on digital infrastructure with Brookfield after joining the BlackRock-led AI Infrastructure Partnership last year alongside fellow anchor investor Temasek Holdings of Singapore.

AIP, founded by asset management goliath BlackRock, its Global Infrastructure Partners unit, Abu Dhabi’s MGX and tech giants Microsoft and Nvidia, last month announced a deal to buy US-based Aligned Data Centers at an enterprise value of $40 billion.

Aligned, which is owned by managed funds of Australia’s Macquarie Asset Management, has a portfolio of 50 data centre campuses and over 5GW of operational and planned capacity across the US and Latin America.

The deal was billed as the largest ever for data centres, dwarfing the $16.1 billion enterprise value of Asia Pacific platform AirTrunk upon its acquisition last year by private equity giant Blackstone and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

Brookfield is also invested in Digital Connexion, an Indian data centre joint venture with US trust Digital Realty and Mumbai-based Reliance Industries, as well as multi-national platforms Compass Datacenters and DCI Data Centres.