BlackRock highlights AI value shift toward physical infrastructure
The world's largest asset manager sees energy providers and data center builders as the next wave of AI beneficiaries, projecting 148 GW of new power capacity needed by 2030.
For the past few years, the AI trade has been synonymous with a handful of chipmakers and cloud software giants. BlackRock thinks that era is winding down, and the real money is about to flow somewhere far less glamorous: concrete, copper wire, and cooling systems.
The firm’s Investment Institute has laid out a case that AI-driven value creation is migrating from semiconductors and software toward the physical infrastructure required to keep data centers humming. Think power plants, transmission networks, and the sprawling campuses of server farms that make large language models possible.
The numbers behind the pivot
BlackRock estimates that roughly 148 gigawatts of additional power capacity will be needed by the end of the decade to satisfy data center demand. For context, data centers consumed about 42 GW in 2025. That means the world needs to build more than three times the current power footprint in roughly five years.
BlackRock also projects that global data center load will nearly double by 2030 compared to 2025 levels. The demand doesn’t stop at electricity generation either. It extends to fiber networks, grid interconnections, and the cooling infrastructure that keeps thousands of GPUs from melting into very expensive paperweights.
This isn’t just an American phenomenon. A BlackRock-backed consortium is reportedly in discussions for a potential $20 to $25 billion acquisition of Stack Infrastructure’s data center portfolio across Asia-Pacific, signaling that the buildout race is thoroughly global.
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Institutional investors are already repositioning
BlackRock’s own client surveys, conducted between January and September 2026 among EMEA institutional investors, paint a clear picture of where the smart money is headed.
More than half of surveyed institutional investors in the EMEA region said they favor energy companies that fuel data centers as a top AI-related investment theme. Another 37% pointed to infrastructure builders as their preferred play on the AI trend.
In June 2026, BlackRock explicitly identified energy and infrastructure bottlenecks as crucial investment opportunities that exist beyond the traditional tech darlings.
Why physical infrastructure is the new moat
BlackRock appears to view these assets as long-duration beneficiaries, meaning their value should compound over multiple years rather than being subject to the quarterly earnings volatility that plagues chip stocks.
BlackRock’s positioning suggests the firm believes this infrastructure gap represents one of the largest investable themes of the next several years. The asset manager is backing that thesis with action, not just commentary, given its consortium’s pursuit of multi-billion-dollar data center acquisitions across the Asia-Pacific region.