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By Dawn Lim and Layan Odeh

June 3, 2026 at 10:10 AM EDTThe 1,400-acre construction site for Project Jupiter, an AI data center under development, New Mexico, in November 2025.Source: NYTNS

Bloom Energy Corp. struggled for years to convince investors its fuel cells were a practical alternative to cheaper sources of electricity. Then Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. came along right as the AI boom ramped up.

The investment manager pledged up to $5 billionlate last year to deploy Bloom’s devices at data centers that need energy to run AI models. It was the first wager for Brookfield’s new artificial intelligence fund — a piece of a bigger campaign to amass $50 billion for the grids, transportation networks and physical structures driving the economy.

Brookfield’s cash will help meet the city-size electricity needs of an Oracle Corp. data center campus in New Mexico, said people familiar with the matter. The project, spanning 1,400 acres across desert land, ties Brookfield to Oracle’s aggressive push to support ChatGPT maker OpenAI’s power-hungry computing processes. 

Best known as an offshoot of a Canadian conglomerate whose infrastructure bets spanned freight railways, toll roads and utilities, today the New York-based investment giant is also betting that the physical foundations behind the computing boom will become a $7 trillion opportunity. AI will feature in every infrastructure strategy as the firm seeks to raise roughly $50 billion across such funds, said people familiar with the matter.

Infrastructure investments have historically taken the form of bridges, sewage systems and other public works, not data centers or chips providers. Some investors have begun to wonder whether Brookfield is stretching the definition of “infrastructure” and have held off on backing the AI fund, said people familiar with the matter. 

TD Securities Inc.’s Cherilyn Radbourne summed up some of the concerns recently. “How do you manage the balancing act of leaning in enough to AI without getting over-allocated to it?” she asked Brookfield executives on an analysts call last month.

The investment opportunity in AI infrastructure is so vast that the firm can be selective, responded Brookfield Asset Management’s 38-year-old chief executive officer, Connor Teskey. The stakes are high for Brookfield, which is banking on AI to help double its fee-bearing assets and close the gap on rivals Blackstone Inc. and Apollo Global Management Inc.Connor TeskeyPhotographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

These asset managers are plowing ever-more cash into AI, stepping in to finance deals when banks can’t supply the sheer magnitude of cash needed to construct massive data facilities. The ever-larger deals are turning infrastructure, once a staid and sleepy corner of finance, into a buzzy space that’s sparking both ebullience and trepidation.

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“Infrastructure firms broadly are seeking to invest in the enablement of the AI boom,” said Alan Synnott, global head of real assets at Mercer. “It’s important investors know what they’re investing in along the way and are making sure they deal with technology obsolescence.”

Brookfield is betting that its AI infrastructure plays will reliably deliver cash for years, and that well-structured contracts will protect investors if new technologies replace older ones.

“Our AI infrastructure strategy is formulated to build the backbone of AI,” Brookfield said in a statement. “It is focused on investing in long-life, critical assets.”

Contrarian Bet

Over the next two years, Brookfield’s infrastructure arm plans to raise about $30 billion for its main fund, $7 billion to do debt financings and another roughly $2 billion for deals that don’t fit neatly into debt or equity, the people said, asking not to be named discussing non-public information. 

The funds will invest in a swath of deals, and the most concentrated AI bet is a new $10 billion thematic fund founded with money from the Middle East. The numbers underscore the massive investment needed to build critical physical structures.

“We’re just rewiring the world,” Brookfield Corp. CEO Bruce Flatt said recently at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, adding that half of his firm’s holdings didn’t exist as an investable asset class 15 years ago. 

The firm’s more than $255 billion infrastructure portfolio includes a global data center empire. It’s backing a $30 billion deal with Intel Corp. to expand chip plants in Arizona. And in July, Brookfield joined Wall Street heavyweights and President Donald Trump at an energy summit to unveil a $3 billion power deal with Google.President Donald Trump, center, during the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh on July 15, 2025.Photographer: Brian Kaiser/Bloomberg

Brookfield’s AI zeal has prompted questions about how it will hedge against the possibility that new technologies will render existing AI investments obsolete. Nowhere is that debate more evident than in its AI infrastructure fund’s backing of chips-on-demand firm Radiant. That model faces investor concerns that inventories could rapidly lose value if future AI models run with fewer processors.

Radiant takes steps to mitigate that risk, according to Brookfield, such as relying on contracts with investment-grade customers. Radiant doesn’t purchase chips until it secures a customer contract, and those customers still have to honor the lease, in arrangements structured to help the company recoup costs, according to a person familiar with the matter. Meanwhile, other large asset managers have also bet on firms that rent out computing capacity.

Read More: Google, Blackstone to Create AI Cloud Firm With In-House Chips

Not everyone is convinced the strategy is safe from disruption. One US pension gatekeeper told investors it doesn’t recommend Brookfield’s AI fund, arguing on-demand chips companies don’t count as infrastructure, according to one of the people. 

AI infrastructure can be a way to achieve higher returns, but the risks need to be managed, said Tracy Gallagher, head of investment strategy at wealth management company Allocate. 

“It’s not your grandfather’s infrastructure,” she said. “If an asset class becomes exciting, it’s because there is a new risk dynamic introduced.”

Growing Complications

To lead its global bet on AI infrastructure, Brookfield has tapped Sikander Rashid. The 40-year-old — whose favorite subjects at Canada’s University of Waterloo were combinatorics and applied probability — also leads the firm’s business across Europe.

Since joining in 2012, Rashid has ascended the ranks by landing multibillion-dollar deals such as the C$4.3 billion ($3.1 billion) acquisition of HVAC systems company Enercare Inc. He later led the European infrastructure team, closing more multibillion-dollar acquisitions including a British plumbing and air conditioning firm.

Rashid then pitched AI infrastructure to his bosses and forged close ties with Nvidia Corp., an early backer of his fund that’s supplying chips for Brookfield’s GPU-for-rent business. He also helped broker a €20 billion investment to deploy AI infrastructure across France, announcing the deal alongside French President Emmanuel Macron, who declared it a part of the country’s “battle for independence.”Sikander RashidPhotographer: Cyril Marcilhacy/Bloomberg

“It’s been one of the most fun projects, if not the most fun assignment I’ve had over the last 13 years at the firm,” Rashid said at Brookfield’s investor day last year, referring to building the AI fund.

Rashid’s profile is rising at Brookfield, and he’s viewed as a potential contender to succeed infrastructure CEO Sam Pollock, said people familiar with the matter. Pollock, a 32-year Brookfield veteran and confidant to Flatt, has spearheaded the expansion of the infrastructure business. If Rashid’s AI efforts succeed, it could boost his position in the race to fill that coveted role. 

Along the way, Rashid fends off AI skeptics. 

“Investors, and I guess everyone at Brookfield, is rightly thinking about, is this a bubble?” Rashid said in Brookfield’s event in September. Despite unprecedented demand for data centers, he assured analysts that Brookfield isn’t investing any capital “on a speculative basis.”

Fears of a bubble aren’t the only thing that could complicate his push into AI, though.

In December, the firm announced plans to work with Qai, a subsidiary of Qatar Investment Authority, to develop AI infrastructure in the Mideast nation and beyond. The US and Israel attacked Iran less than three months later, sparking an escalating regional conflict.

Since then, military strikes have impaired the nation-state’s gas infrastructure, and drone attacks damaged at least three data centers in other Gulf states. A Qai spokesperson said the strategy remains the same, and Brookfield reiterated its commitment in March.

Read More: Drone Strikes Damage Amazon Data Centers in the UAE and Bahrain

Meanwhile, the entire industry faces questions about the value of data centers given uncertainty around how much they’ll be used given the rapid advances in chip technology. Across the firm, Brookfield has had a hand in asset sales between its own funds and portfolio companies, complicated deals that raise questions over whether sales are priced fairly.

Rashid played a major role when Brookfield shifted a fund’s stake in a collection of European data centers from Brookfield-backed Data4 to two outside investors, Arjun Infrastructure Partners and Interogo Holdings. Another Brookfield fund deemed more suited for the mature assets then invested too.

Sometimes Brookfield isn’t directly involved in these types of negotiations. 

Take Compass Datacenters, a Brookfield portfolio company. After initial discussions with potential buyers to sell several of its facilities didn’t lead to a deal, the company sold roughly $1 billion of the assets to another Brookfield-backed company, Centersquare. Brookfield recused itself from discussions over the deal, according to people familiar with the matter.

The data centers were seen as a better fit for Centersquare, according to some of the people familiar with the matter. While Centersquare targets customers that seek to rent out capacity in smaller bites, Compass builds and operates big campuses for tech customers.

Amid the debate over the future value of AI assets, Brookfield is accelerating its AI push. On the earnings call last month, Teskey said the Bloom Energy deal had been announced less than a year earlier.

“We are already in conversations to expand that partnership,” he said, “not by percentages, but by multiples.”

— With assistance from Andrew Harrer