Blackstone Lands Major Commitment

With debt, Blackstone expects to be able to invest in more than $100 billion in infrastructure projects, and this fund marks the first large dedicated fund to infrastructure, though Blackstone has certainly pursued these types of efforts (more than $40 billion invested over the past 15 years) in the past as part of general funds. Infrastructure investment has been an area of strong interest by limited partners, with peers such as KKR ($3.1 billion for a 2015 fund), Oaktree, Brookfield Asset Management (which raised a $14 billion fund in 2016), and Global Infrastructure Partners (a recent $15.8 billion fund) all operating in the space. The niche is attractive because it offers the opportunity to invest in investments that can generate fairly reliable cash flows for decades, often protected by regulation or geographic barriers to entry, in a fund that matches up with the investment horizon for sovereign wealth funds.

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