基础设施：投资以支持全球增长
Investing to supportglobal growth
Private capital’s role in meeting the world’s growing need forinfrastructure continues to grow, with record fundraising anddeployment in 2025.
This article is a collaborative effort by Adrian Kwok, Alastair Green, and Connor Mangan,with Charlie Regan, Kali Na, and Roman Strelov, representing views from McKinsey’sInfrastructure Special Initiative group and Private Capital Practice.
The worldneeds infrastructure more acutely than ever. A cumulative$106 trillionin investmentsis imperative to meet global infrastructure requirements through 2040, not only for traditionalassets such as roads, ports, bridges, and power grids but also for the next generation of thoseassets—andan emerging intersection of systems and facilities across verticals, including datacenters, charging stations, fiber-optic networks, and more. This unprecedented call for capitalcan no longer be answered by the public sector alone.
Private capital is meeting the moment. In 2025, global infrastructure fundraising reacheda record of nearly $200 billion, surpassing the previous high of $180 billion in 2022. Limitedpartners (LPs) continue to name infrastructure as the asset class they most want to increasetheir allocations to (increasingly for both diversification and performance) and are also displayinga willingness to move up the risk curve. General partners (GPs) are doing larger, more complexdeals, with notably large funds (several holding $5 billion or more of committed capital) gainingshare as the industry matures.
While overall trends in fundraising and deployment are positive, potentially tougher conditionsahead are evident, particularly as holding periods lengthen and investors seek commensurate,risk-adjusted returns. The ability to drive value creation will become increasingly foundational.
A prodigious need for infrastructure and apromising response from investors
The world has an immense need for infrastructure, a global mandate that is being met in largepart with a massive influx of private capital. Over the past few years, private capital has beenflowing into infrastructure assets at an unprecedented rate. In 2025, the surge set a record forfundraising and deployment.
The world’s $106 trillion infrastructure need
As we’verecentlydetailed, to meet the demands of global population growth and enableparabolic technological advancement, the world requires an estimated $106 trillion ininfrastructure investment by 2040. This enormous capital requirement coincides with anevolving landscape where the very conception of “infrastructure” is expanding acrossmultiple verticals and emerging, intersecting sectors—from dams to data centers and railwaysto renewables.
A cumulative $106 trillion ininvestments is imperative to meetglobal infrastructure requirementsthrough 2040, not only fortraditional assets but also for thenext generation of those assets.
Moreover, across geographical regions, certain infrastructure categories are growing notablyfaster. Energy and power will require $23 trillion in infrastructure investment through 2040,driven by the dual forces of the global energy transition and demand growth. In the United States,after almost 15 years of growth below 1 percent, power demand is expected to increasebymore than 3 percent a year—with the sector needing to overcome challenges such as energyaffordability, energy supply chain issues, extreme weather, labor availability, project permitbottlenecks, and resource adequacy.Nearly $7 trillion in data center investment(part of digitalinfrastructure) may be needed through 2030 to keep pace with the demand for compute power.
Compared with total global infrastructure needs through 2040 (where the energy and digitalsectors account for about 40 percent of the $106 trillion needed), the composition of recentdeal value shows an outsize presence of private capital in these infrastructure verticals (about75 percent). Energy and power needs were collectively responsible for nearly half of 2025infrastructure deals by value, with the digital and telecommunications sector capturing anadditional quarter of total infrastructure deal activity (Exhibit 1). At the moment, the scale andspeed of required capital deployment in these spaces may favor private investment, as publiccapital can encounter longer approval cycles and significant funding constraints.
Exhibit 1
