What most people get wrong about infrastructure is that it's just simply tunnels and bridges. It's a lot more interesting than that. The world's evolving quite quickly across energy transition, digital infrastructure, and transportation.
We're seeing the need for trillions of dollars in each of those sectors to be invested over the next decade. Data center demand is growing rapidly because of digitization and AI. Whether you're scrolling on Instagram or FaceTiming a friend, you are using digital information that has to be processed in a data center.
We've seen a 17 times increase in the amount of data center demand just over the past five years, and we expect $2 trillion of capital to be invested globally over the next five years. The power market used to be a relatively static market with relatively flat power demand for the past two decades. That is all suddenly changed driven by things like AI, the re-industrialization of our economy, and the electrification of our vehicles.
This is causing a seismic change in the amount of capital that's going to be required to invest behind the energy transition. Another sector we're excited about is the transportation sector. People are traveling more and goods are traveling further to get to us, and that is creating significant investment opportunities.
People don't always think of infrastructure as investable, but it can help diversify a portfolio, and it's actually outperformed public equities over the last 20 years. I think what people are often missing about infrastructure is just the scale of it and the amount of time that it takes to bring any project to life. If you're investing behind a port or a renewable energy project, that can take decades, and we need a long-term perspective and permanent capital.
At Blackstone, we are building the infrastructure of the future.
