A Comprehensive Guide to Private Infrastructure

Essential Assets for an Evolving Economy

Private infrastructure has emerged as one of the most consequential and fastest-evolving segments of the private markets today. Once defined largely by traditional utilities and transportation assets, the asset class has expanded and modernized in step with the transformation of the global economy. Today, infrastructure powers our homes and industries, moves goods across supply chains, transmits data through digital networks and supports the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, electrification, and what Ares defines as the broader “New Economy.”

This guide explores the forces reshaping private infrastructure and the increasing relevance and importance of the asset class. Our aim is to equip investors with a clear, foundational understanding of the opportunities and considerations associated with private infrastructure.

Key Takeaways

• Infrastructure is the backbone of modern society, providing essential, often regulated services—yet aging assets and changing usage patterns are accelerating the need for investment.
• Private capital is filling a multi-trillion-dollar global funding gap as governments retreat from historical spending levels.
• The asset class has generally delivered attractive risk-adjusted returns, diversified return drivers, inflation linkage and resilience through market and economic stress.
• Today’s opportunity set spans energy, digital, utilities and transportation. Some of the fastest growth is in traditional sectors, like electricity generation, while some is in next-generation sectors like fiber, towers, data centers and battery storage.
• Investors can access the asset class across a spectrum—from Core and Core+ income strategies to Value-Add and Opportunistic growth strategies.
• Infrastructure debt offers income (often floating-rate) with low correlations and historically lower defaults than many corporate credit segments.

Portfolio Construction Benefits

• Over the past 20 years, private infrastructure has delivered public equity-like returns with lower volatility than global equities and listed infrastructure.
• Core and Core+ strategies typically generate meaningful income, often 50% or more of total return.
• Low to moderate correlation with key public markets, supporting diversification across equities, bonds, REITs and high yield.
• Core infrastructure can be funded from either equities or fixed income depending on the investor’s goals—income, growth or risk reduction.

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Endnotes

“Historical risk and return,” page 22:

Public and private market indices are provided for illustrative purposes only and have not been selected to represent appropriate market comparisons or targets for any portfolio. Rather, the public and private market indices shown are provided solely to illustrate the performance of well-known and widely recognized indices. References to named indices, markets or composite indices or other measures of relative performance are for comparison purposes only. Comparisons to indices have limitations because indices have volatility and other material characteristics that may differ from the portfolio. Public and private market indices’ performance does not reflect the deduction of transaction costs, management fees, or other costs which would reduce returns. An investor cannot invest directly in an index. Indices include the reinvestment of dividends. Because of these differences, the indices should not be relied upon as an accurate measure of comparison. No representation is being made as to the risk profile of any benchmark or index relative to the risk profile of the fund presented herein. There can be no assurance that the future performance of any specific investment or product will be profitable, equal any corresponding indicated historical performance, or be suitable for a portfolio.

Bloomberg Global High Yield Bond Index is a multi-currency flagship measure of the global high yield debt market. The index represents the union of the US High Yield, the Pan-European High Yield, and Emerging Markets (EM) Hard Currency High Yield Indices.

Bloomberg US Aggregate Bond Index is a broad-based, market capitalization-weighted bond market index representing intermediate term investment grade bonds traded in the United States. Investors frequently use the index as a stand-in for measuring the performance of the US bond market.

Burgiss All Infrastructure Index tracks the performance of private global infrastructure equity investments in 22 countries for the past 20 years.

FTSE NAREIT All Equity REITs Index is a free-float adjusted, market capitalization-weighted index of U.S. equity REITs. Constituents of the index include all tax-qualified REITs with more than 50 percent of total assets in qualifying real estate assets other than mortgages secured by real property.

MSCI World is a broad global equity index that represents large and mid-cap equity performance across all 23 developed markets countries. It covers approximately 85% of the free float-adjusted market capitalization in each country.

S&P Global Infrastructure tracks 75 companies from around the world chosen to represent the listed infrastructure industry while maintaining liquidity and tradability. The index includes three distinct infrastructure clusters: energy, transportation and utilities.

EDHEC Infra 300 is an equally weighted index designed to match the TICCS® allocations of the global unlisted infrastructure equity investment universe.

Dow Jones Brookfield Global Infrastructure is an index of pure-play infrastructure companies globally.

This information is for informational purposes only and is neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation to purchase any related securities. Investing in private markets investments involves a high degree of risk including, but not limited to, risk of substantial loss of principal. Direct investments in private companies and investments involve a high degree of business and financial risk that can result in substantial losses.

Financial advisors must carefully consider the risks and other suitability details in determining appropriate investments for their individual clients’ portfolios.

Data contained herein from third-party providers is obtained from what are considered reliable sources. However, its accuracy, completeness, or reliability cannot be guaranteed. Examples provided are for illustrative purposes only and not intended to be reflective of results an investor can expect to achieve. These materials may contain “forward-looking” information that is not purely historical in nature, and such information contained herein is based upon certain assumptions about future events or conditions and is intended only to illustrate hypothetical results under those assumptions (not all of which will be specified herein).

© 2026 Ares Management Corporation

© 2026 Ares Management Corporation

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