Digital Bridge at Morgan Stanley Conference: Strategic Shift in Digital Infrastructure

On Wednesday, 11 June 2025, Digital Bridge Group (NYSE:DBRG) took center stage at the Morgan Stanley US Financials, Payments & CRE Conference 2025. CEO Mark Gansey highlighted the company’s evolution from a real estate investment trust to a specialized global asset manager in digital infrastructure, now overseeing $100 billion in assets. The conversation covered strategic shifts, including asset deconsolidation and a focus on digital economy capital solutions. Despite challenges, Digital Bridge is poised to leverage its industry expertise for growth.

Key Takeaways

• Digital Bridge has transitioned into a global alternative asset manager with $100 billion in assets.
• The company aims to capitalize on digital economy demands, with a focus on AI-driven power solutions.
• Digital Bridge plans to raise over $20 billion in capital this year and improve margins by 300 to 500 basis points.
• The firm’s strategy includes expanding into mature data centers and power solutions, with a goal to differentiate in the power sector.
• CEO Mark Gansey emphasizes the importance of returning capital to limited partners, with $12 billion returned in the past 30 months.

Financial Results

• Assets Under Management (AUM): Increased from under $20 billion four and a half years ago to $100 billion.
• Debt Reduction: Achieved a $19 billion reduction through strategic asset sales.
• Current Debt: Stands at approximately $300 million, securitized against fee streams and funds.
• Fee Earning AUM Target: Aims to grow from $35 billion to over $40 billion this year.
• Capital Raising Target: Plans to raise over $20 billion in capital, combining debt and equity.
• Margin Improvement: Targeting a 300 to 500 basis point increase in margins this year.

Operational Updates

• Deconsolidation: Completed with Vantage and DataBank to focus on fund products.
• New Strategies: Initiated credit, late-stage venture growth, and liquid securities teams, adding power and stabilized data centers.
• Power Strategy: Building three gigawatts of power with 100 data centers under construction.
• Real Estate Strategy: Focused on mature, income-producing data centers, owning over 300 centers with 16.8 gigawatts of power.

Future Outlook

• Growth Strategy: Emphasizes capital raising, deployment, and customer collaboration for organic growth.
• Secular Bet: Digital infrastructure expected to benefit from long-term trends like cloud, AI, 5G, and fiber connectivity.
• Fundraising Impact: Power and real estate strategies projected to drive significant earnings in 2026.
• Real Estate TAM: Sees opportunities in the $3.7 trillion real estate LP marketplace.

Q&A Highlights

• LP Sophistication: Investors are increasingly seeking specialized investment strategies.
• AI Data Centers: Considered a late pitch, with power solutions being more attractive.
• Denominator Effect: Previously affecting LPs, now stabilized.
• Investor Allocation: Notable interest from GCC and US pensions in AI economy ideas.
• Co-Investment Opportunities: Regularly offers curated digital opportunities, with three to eight co-investments at any time.

Digital Bridge’s strategic transformation under Mark Gansey’s leadership positions it as a key player in the digital economy. For more details, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Morgan Stanley US Financials, Payments & CRE Conference 2025:

Stephanie Ma, Member of the brokers, asset managers and exchanges team, Morgan Stanley Research: Good afternoon and thanks for joining us for our last fireside chat of the Morgan Stanley Financials Conference. I’m Stephanie Ma, member of the brokers, asset managers and exchanges team for Morgan Stanley Research.

For our final session of the day, it’s my pleasure to welcome Mark Gansey, CEO of Digital Bridge. Digital Bridge is a leading global alternative asset manager specializing in digital infrastructure investing with $100,000,000,000 of assets under management. Thanks for joining us today,

Mark Gansey, CEO, Digital Bridge: And thanks, Stephanie. Good to be here.

Stephanie Ma, Member of the brokers, asset managers and exchanges team, Morgan Stanley Research: Great. So maybe let’s kick off with some background of the business for those of us around the room that are less familiar with Digital Bridge. We understand at your legacy, you were a REIT with balance sheet investments. So what led to the decision to deconsolidate, simplify the business model, and where do you stand today in that evolution?

Mark Gansey, CEO, Digital Bridge: Well, of all, we do trace our roots back as an operator. So I think a lot of people have different paths in how they end up in the alternative asset management space. Our journey was really about a continuation and an arc which was started for me thirty two years ago, which was building mission critical infrastructure for customers. And so what’s happened in the last three decades in infrastructure, particularly in digital assets, is as technology has evolved, the capital required to build this infrastructure has also evolved. And I’ll just say it’s not only evolved, it’s gotten significantly bigger.

And the need for ubiquitous everywhere coverage around the world today is a big business. Whether it’s mobile networks, fiber networks, data infrastructure. And I think when I started thirty years ago, I don’t think anyone thought building cell towers was mission critical infrastructure. I think people looked at a cell phone and they said that was a luxury item, right? And now today, cell phones are mobile devices are a big part of our fabric of what we do.

And so we started as a REIT, as you said, because it was easy for us to deploy capital in a REIT format. It was very efficient and it was a good tax structure. But something happened about ten years ago, which was the advent of the public cloud. And when we started building our big data centers and those data centers went from being $50,000,000 projects to $200,000,000 projects to $800,000,000 projects, the quantum of capital shifted really fast into high gear. And what we found is that to continue to grow our portfolio companies, we were going to have to go out and get party capital.

Because we couldn’t keep up with the cadence at which it was moving. And so we did that. We did it in a series of continuation vehicles from 2013 to 2019. We successfully raised about 4,000,000,000 of party capital. We took an audacious sort of assumption that people would pay us to manage that capital.

So we took a small fee and a large promote. And before you knew it, we were sitting on $14,000,000,000 of assets, party assets. And we were growing faster than American Tower and Digital Realty and Equinix, much faster. Why were we growing faster? Because we could take that capital, we could deploy it at speed and at scale.

And then in 2019, we launched our commingled fund. And then in 2020, we merged with Colony Capital, which was an alternative asset manager in the real estate space. And then shortly thereafter, I became the CEO and the board gave me the mantle of dismantling our commercial real estate and going full into digital. And so we did that. At that point in time, we were less than $20,000,000,000 of assets.

This is going back four and a half years ago. And as you said correctly, today we’re $100,000,000,000 in assets under management. And the balance sheet is very much simplified. Got rid of $19,000,000,000 of debt. We sold off $50,000,000,000 of real estate.

Today we have about 300,000,000 of debt, which is our securitized debt against our fee streams and our funds. And the story has gotten easier, and our balance sheet got lighter. We deconsolidated our two big balance sheet investments, which was Vantage, which builds huge hyperscale campuses to the leading tech companies in the world. And then DataBank, which is a really significant edge computing business, where we build edge data centers to support growth at the edge of networks. And both those assets have performed incredibly well.

And so instead of putting balance sheet capital back to work into hard assets, we made the decision to start putting balance sheet capital into fund products. And that’s really been the shift in the balance sheet. So as we lighten the balance sheet, we grew our GP stakes business. And at the same time, we figured out that if we were going to go asset light and we were going to be eventually an alternative asset manager, which is a decision we took in first quarter last year, we also understood that we’d created this really unique flywheel, which is a three twenty person team globally, always looking in and around the digital infrastructure ecosystem. And what was happening in that flywheel is we were letting opportunity escape two, three years ago.

And when I say opportunity was escaping, we were allowing certain assets that were core moving off to people that did core investments. Our really good assets, we didn’t know how to do continuation funds. We saw middle market digital infrastructure firms which we couldn’t put equity work, we’re doing loans. And eventually, we’ve gotten onto this notion around power and real estate, which I’ll get to in a But what was clear to us is there was this incredible flywheel of knowledge. We sit at the fulcrum of it, which is dead in the center, which is we get to see companies early.

And so there was an opportunity to deploy capital in other ways. So we stood up a credit team. We stood up a late stage venture growth team. We stood up a liquid securities group. And recently, we’ve stood up a group to go do power and to do stabilized data centers in a real estate format.

We made this decision in the jump last year to become a multi strat firm. And I think that was our proclamation that we’re here to stay. We’re going to stay in the alternative asset management space and we’re going to grow our product sets. We’re going to stand up new teams, stand up new products, and we believe that we can continue to grow organically through raising capital, deploying capital, but coming back to one core tenant, which is that we work for customers. We have this unique privilege that we work for the biggest customers in the world, or as you say, the magnificent seven, but we also work for Verizon and AT and T and Deutsche Telekom and Orange and Vodafone.

And these are big long lived multi decade relationships. My bet, my secular bet, we all have to make a bet whether it’s, whether you’re Michael Aaron Getty, Jonathan Gray, Bruce Flatt or Mark Ansey, you’re making a bet. And our bet is that ultimately, digital infrastructure will be a tailwind that will persist for decades to come. And whether it’s cloud, whether it’s AI, whether it’s five gs, whether it’s fiber connectivity, whatever it is, digital is no longer a luxury item, it’s a necessity. And it’s a critical necessity in terms of how the global economy works and functions and it’s becoming more prevalent.

And at the same time, the aperture is widening. And as the aperture widens, there’s more CapEx going into the ground and there’s more capital needed and there’s more capital solutions needed to the digital economy. We want to be the biggest and most important and trusted provider of that capital to the digital economy. And that’s where we’ve made our claim. And just based on the size that we are, we may be smalls and all, but in the digital world we’re the biggest at what we do.

Stephanie Ma, Member of the brokers, asset managers and exchanges team, Morgan Stanley Research: A lot of alternative asset manager investors and analysts like myself, we like to characterize the firms as balance sheet light or balance sheet heavy.

Mark Gansey, CEO, Digital Bridge: Yes.

Stephanie Ma, Member of the brokers, asset managers and exchanges team, Morgan Stanley Research: Don’t know if this is a tough question, but where does Digital Bridge fall in that sector?

Mark Gansey, CEO, Digital Bridge: I’d say we’re at the tail end of a transition.

Stephanie Ma, Member of the brokers, asset managers and exchanges team, Morgan Stanley Research: Okay.

Mark Gansey, CEO, Digital Bridge: I think we were balance sheet heavy. Now we’re moving more towards balance sheet light. I would say today we’re balance sheet, what I’d call neutral, which is somewhere in between. Maybe it’s balance sheet Goldilocks, depending on how you look at it. But I think we have a good balance sheet.

I think the key is for me, it’s not so much as a this is my time as a CEO. I look at the balance sheet and I say, I don’t really care if it’s big or small. I really focus on what are my debt service obligations and whether or not we can continue to use the balance sheet correctly. And so we’ve always made the case to public investors whether we were a REIT or whether we’re an alternative asset manager, said we’re going to be very judicious about how we allocate capital. The highest priority of allocating capital should be to maximize shareholder value, period, irrespective of your format.

And so for us, it’s how can we continue to scale and how can we continue to leg into verticals where we have a very articulated competitive advantage. When I say an articulated competitive advantage, again, I have to use Bruce and John and Aaron Getty and Rowan as the guys that I have to go compete. My battlefield changed. Know, I was competing against American Tower Crown and Equinix and DLR, and today I have to compete against guys that are managing trillions of dollars of capital. So I have to have a differentiation.

I have to have an edge. And our edge is that at the core, we know how to deploy capital because we’re deploying that capital in what I call success based situations, which is there’s always a customer tethered to what we’re doing. So whether we’re originating a loan in our credit business, whether we’re making a late stage venture growth investment, whether we’re in flagship or whatever we’re doing, power, real estate, we’re making those decisions because we know the counterparty credit risk. At the end of the day, when you invest, and again, it really doesn’t matter who you are, there has to be a core set of guiding principles on how you deploy capital on behalf of institutions. And this is where I think we really stand out in Excel, because of the fact that we, our origins were that of an industrialist, where we built the infrastructure.

And we spent the twenty years of our careers building and owning it and working for customers. We have this very fundamental nature of how we underwrite, which is to the basics. Do you own the land? Do you have the great customer relationship? Is it a long term contracted obligation?

Do you have escalation provisions? And can you grow the asset? And I think that’s, from that comes a whole series of opportunities. If you can really distill that investment, whether it’s credit or whether it’s equity, we actually underwrite credit and equity the same. Because fundamentally, the look through always has to be about the asset.

It has to be about the customer. Again, back to what are we today? We’re an alternative asset manager. So the look through and whatever strategy that I’m standing up, we can get into the strategies in a I have this core belief about what we do and how we deploy capital that actually resonates through all of our strategies, which is pretty unique.

Stephanie Ma, Member of the brokers, asset managers and exchanges team, Morgan Stanley Research: Now Mark, you are a veteran in the space. You’re an investor operator for over thirty years in digital infrastructure. How does the build out of AI echo some of the prior technological shifts that we’ve seen in the past, from internet, mobile, cloud? How is this era similar or different?

Mark Gansey, CEO, Digital Bridge: Well, I think of all, it’s similar in the sense that every seven years we have this unique opportunity, these tectonic shifts in technology where the hardware changes, the software changes, and the customer business models slightly change. And so, we have to re underwrite our customers every seven years. It’s kind of fun actually. And so part of my job is, as the CEO of the firm is, I always get the opportunity to go out and I talk to customers. I think I get my best applied learnings when I’m sitting with the CEO of one of the hyperscalers or like tonight I leave for Germany to go sit at a board meeting with Deutsche Telekom where I learn a lot from the leadership at DT.

And these unique relationships that I’ve built over thirty years provides me insight and it really guides how I’m thinking about how I allocate capital. And again, that’s where we are a little bit different than the other guys, because where I’m seeing opportunity isn’t exactly where the other guys are seeing opportunity. I see it from a customer perspective. I see it at the ground floor and I think that really informs our decision making about where we deploy capital. So that’s pretty exciting.

So a lot of this is kind of the same, but here’s what’s happening with AI that’s really different, is just out of zero. Literally out of zero. So if public cloud was essentially a 30 gigawatt opportunity and we deployed circa, I’ll call it 700 to 900,000,000,000 of CapEx, well here comes AI. We’re deploying 7,000,000,000,000 of CapEx. We’re deploying 300 gigawatts of power, and just the magnitude and the scale of what’s happening is hard to really digest.

And I remember the time we had a mobile carrier in the ninety’s say they were going to spend a $100,000,000 CapEx, and I was like, hey, a 100,000,000 in CapEx, that’s huge. Think about where we’ve evolved from digital PCS in the late ninety’s to really thinking about inference and generative AI and where we’re going with these applications. Oh, which by the way, most of that data will run through your phone, right? As we think about the extension of generative AI and inferencing, it’s all going to happen mobile. And what’s really unique about the ecosystem in AI is it permeates through everything that we do.

So again, whether it’s credit, whether it’s core, whether it’s core plus, these strategies are all tethered to this AI thematic. And then it comes back to the fun part as an asset allocator, how is Digital Bridge deploying that capital? How are we thinking about it? What’s different about what we’re doing versus what Blackstone’s doing versus what Brookfield’s doing and what KKR’s doing? And I think for us, again, that industrial approach is the edge.

We’re seeing more at bats. We can be more discerning. Know, in big digital rich fund, like our current flagship fund, we have a real big advantage there, because we’re taking 10 to 14 positions in digital infrastructure in North America, Europe, and Asia, and we’re investing in fiber and cell towers and data centers. So building a diversified portfolio is very different than building a generalist fund. So if I’m, if I’ve got some new shiny $25,000,000,000 infrastructure fund, I’m telling investors I’m gonna allocate 20 to 25% of digital, it means you’re using two bullets for digital.

You better get it right, because if you miss on one of them and the other one goes okay, you actually end up hurting the fund. So investing in digital is not for tourists. It’s a complicated industry. And I think the other thing that hasn’t changed about whether it was towers in the 90s, fiber in the early 2000s, public cloud ten years ago, AI today. At every iteration, every decade, you do have these big secular trends and you have what I call late capital arriving to the game.

And so what’s interesting about AI is you have a ton of capital inflows coming from real estate and generalists that are now seeing that digital is a great way to deploy capital quickly and build your AUM. And so you get a lot of people that are chasing a secular trend, but don’t have that industrial background and don’t have that framework where they’ve been building for customers for thirty years. So this is a real chance for us to differentiate and show to LPs that we can be differentiated. And I think in this environment, you have to be differentiated. I just got done, I was on a three week road show between The US, Europe, and The Gulf seeing investors.

And never before has it been more important to have a track record, and most importantly to have a specialist approach. Where you have unique and proprietary deal flow. The thing that LPs sit down and talk to us about, they say is, hey look, it’s great, we’re happy to see you again, let’s talk about your track record. How much money have you given back to us in the last twenty four months? And then the thing they say is, immediately say is, okay, what’s your best co investment idea?

And how are you going to show me something unique and proprietary? You know the great thing about us is we generally have anywhere between three to eight co investments happening at the same time, and so the conversation that I can have with a sovereign wealth fund or pension fund actually is differentiated from what a Blackstone or Brookfield can say, because I can sit there and say, well actually, where do you want to be? Okay, you want to be in Asia, great. You want to be in fiber? You want to be in data centers?

You want to be in towers? You want to be exposed to AI? Mobility? What do you want? We can curate digital opportunities for LPs that other GPs cannot, just because of the depth of what we’re doing.

The depth of the product set, the depth of the geography, and the depth of the portfolio companies and customers we have. So that’s where we have to lay our stake, because I can’t compete with the other guys in terms of size and volume. But what I would say is LPs really do appreciate that specialization, and they appreciate the fact that I can curate a portfolio for them that’s based on currency, geography, sub sector, asset class, and customer mix. The depth at which we can go and underwrite is just a different level. And that’s really for us why we’ve been able to attract so much capital, last year and why we’re attracting a lot of capital, this year.

So far so good.

Stephanie Ma, Member of the brokers, asset managers and exchanges team, Morgan Stanley Research: And how sophisticated are these LPs? Are they just in their early innings in terms of allocating to infrastructure and how has that tone shifted over the last two or three years?

Mark Gansey, CEO, Digital Bridge: I would say the sophisticated LPs today, again this is just very fresh having just come off the road. The sophisticated ones almost have a a they’re almost a little bit jaded about digital, which is interesting, in the sense that they sort of laugh. There’s kind of an inside joke of, oh I only got presented 50 data center deals this week. And they laugh with us. We say that’s nice.

Let’s talk about the data center deal you really want to do, and then we get into it. And I think the fact that we can quickly drill down into specifically what they want based on again, geography, what type of data centers do they want, what’s the credit quality they want, what’s the exposure, do they want yield, do they want total return, that layer of intricacies that I can go into with a client is a very different conversation than let’s say a real estate fund, you know, that comes along whether it’s, you know, won’t name names, but they say, oh I have this data center project in Dublin and you have to be in it. And the LP just goes, well what’s unique about that? They go, it’s a data center deal. And they go, no no, tell us what’s really unique about it.

And they don’t have an answer. And I think that uniqueness around what’s happening today is what gets LPs excited. And so for us, we’re not pitching AI data centers. That was yesterday’s idea. And I think if you’re pitching AI data centers today to LPs, you’re late.

That’s my sort of take on it. I think the real differentiation today with sophisticated investors is how are you going to power the AI economy? And how do you take that power and tether it to a customer, which is a data center, right, essentially? And so the different ways that you can power the AI economy and tether that to a long term contracted obligation with a customer is exactly what sophisticated LPs want to talk about. Because they really want to understand that not only do you have the land and you have the customer, but how are you going to activate the customer?

Because ultimately, bringing that power into the data hall and lighting up those GPUs and understanding how to cool it correctly, and understanding how the data center doesn’t go down, and having the backup power and the battery sets and the microgrids and all the stuff that you need to be competitive, Those are the solution sets that we’re bringing to LPs today. And they really appreciate it. And so we spent this last sort of thirty days on the road talking about that. You know, for us it’s about really going to the next place, not the trick that we, you know, that we were, you know, were pitching data centers seven years ago, so now we’re not pitching that. We’re saying, look, you’ve got to be in power and you’ve got to ultimately figure out the right capital for how these data centers get to the next place, which is maturation.

So as the investment cycle moves through, I’m thinking about how do we take really good investment grade data centers and move them to their rightful place, which is probably insurance money, real estate capital, right? So these are the things that we’re talking about on the road today with LPs, and the receptivity has been strong. It’s been a very, very good, you know, last thirty days in terms of fundraising. I think we got through the bumpiness of the sort of tariff trade. That’s kind of leveled out.

I think we don’t obviously know where it’s going to completely level out, but there was a little bit of a denominator effect going on with LPs in April. That’s calmed down now. So the auction’s kind of out of the room a little bit. And I think in certain locations, particularly in the GCC and here home in The US with US pensions, we’re seeing investors allocate. And they’re putting capital to work in good ideas, fresh ideas, new ideas around the AI economy.

And that’s what our job is between now and the end of the year, to continue to evangelize what’s really happening in AI, and the challenges around the grid, and the challenges that exist with the regulators around how to ultimately navigate baseload. And it’s exciting. I mean, I think some of the things that we’re doing in power are very differentiated, and I think will be the stuff that people will talk about over the next ten years.

Stephanie Ma, Member of the brokers, asset managers and exchanges team, Morgan Stanley Research: And maybe double clicking into your fundraising targets, I think you’ve laid out a roadmap to grow fee earning AUM to over $40,000,000,000 through the course of this year from $35,000,000,000 of which includes about 5,000,000,000 to $6,000,000,000 of gross fundraising. So maybe you can just remind us of the key contributors and any updates on how that’s trending this year?

Mark Gansey, CEO, Digital Bridge: Yes, so good second quarter, here to say we’re on track. Dare to say we’re probably better than on track. I think the capital that we have formed here in the second quarter is really tethered to some great unique proprietary ideas. And most importantly, we’re getting paid for those ideas. So I think we articulated that I looked at this year as kind of a European football match that will be played in kind of two halves.

The half of our year was really dedicated to finishing out our fund three and our credit fund two strategies, which investors are still allocating to and are really receptive to that. The piece to that was making sure that we beat our guidance on co investments and that we get paid for co investments. That was something we didn’t do as good a job last year and I told the street we would do a better job. So I think both of those goals were achieved in Q1 and Q2. We’ve had strong receptivity in co investments.

We’ve had strong investment activity in Fund III and Fund II. And we’re exactly where we want to be. I’d actually say, I think I’m a little ahead of where I want to be. And now we’re coming into the launch of our new strategies. So part of this road show that began three weeks ago, four weeks ago on the West Coast Of The US and finished up last week in The Gulf was a chance to get out and talk about power and talk about real estate.

So why power? Why real estate? Why are these the two new strategies that Digital Bridge has embarked on? Well, power was logical. You know, we own over 300 data centers.

We have 16.8 gigawatts of power. That’s essentially, you know, almost 3.5 New York cities, just to contextualize it correctly. And you know, currently we’re building another three gigawatts of power. We’ve got about a 100 data centers in construction. And so we sit in a really unique position, which is we own the data center and we own the customer relationship.

And we’ve been generally allowing the publicly traded utility companies to benefit and arbitrage our power. And it is our power. It’s our power that serves our customers. So what we’ve discovered in the last two to three years is we think there’s an opportunity to own that active and passive infrastructure adjacent to the data center that controls the flow power in and out of our data centers. And at the same time, just taking a page out of my old playbook from twenty years ago, one thing I learned about fiber is fiber really works well when you interconnect it to other fiber networks.

Well guess what? Power’s the same. When you learn to take your power, sell that power, your excess power into the grid, and you can trade that power on the grid, you don’t have to trade it just with one source of power. If you’re interconnected, you can actually trade to, for example, if I had a huge data center in Reno, Nevada, happen to have a huge data center in Reno, Nevada, and we have a great relationship with Nevada Power and Light, but we have our own microgrid in a place like Reno. And in Reno, it’s really unique because that grid cross connects to actually five other huge utilities.

So if I don’t like the spot rate where I have excess power to Nevada Power and Light, I don’t have to sell to them. I can sell that power to Puget Power, I can sell it to Portland General, I can sell it to Pacific Gas and Electric. So we have this unique opportunity to take advantage of our surplus in power and trade it. And meanwhile, the undercurrent of that microgrid is it’s tethered to four or five key customers that have signed long term ten to fifteen year contracts on PPAs and you understand the PPA business quite well from other alternative asset managers. So imagine, Stephanie, you have a business where you have a PPA that has a ten to fifteen year contract with an investment grade customer growing at two to 3%.

And that’s basically essentially underwrites your whole microgrid. Now you layer on top of that, like a cell tower, the customer, the customer, and the customer, where you’re selling power in your data center. Then you have this new opportunity, which is you sell the excess power at a 2x, 3x premium to the grid, to other utility providers. Now that’s no longer a 12 IRR. That’s not an infrastructure return.

I’m not gonna tell you what the returns are, but you start getting into a really exciting space. So we built a couple of our own microgrids. We got smarter about it. We found a really great industrial partner to work with in this new strategy. We currently have 13 to $14,000,000,000 of opportunity to build what I call grid independent power to the AI economy.

We don’t think anyone’s doing what we’re doing, because we have such a large data center portfolio and we have so many customers. All the power we’re building we can tether to a customer like that. That’s very unique. Again, the Digital Bridge advantage, we talk about that. Why are the things that we’re doing different than what our peers are doing?

When you have such a big network of infrastructure, you can leverage it, just the same way we leverage our fiber. When you own 300 data centers, guess where you can sell your fiber to? Your 300 data centers. So I’m trying to find adjacencies where we can be unique, and we can be differentiated, and we can create risk adjusted returns that are better than our peers. And I think that’s what’s exciting about power.

That’s what we’re doing in power today. So I’m really energized, no pun intended, about what we’re doing in power because I think it’s unique, I think it’s differentiated. And again, it’s back to that core underwriting requirement, it’s tethered to an investment grade customer. And that’s what investors like. LPs get really excited about this.

So we had the chance to talk to a lot of investors in the last thirty days about that product, that strategy, and everyone’s really fired up about it. So where we guided the street to is, we’ve have launched two new strategies, I’ll get to real estate in a but Power’s launch, Digital Power’s launch, and we said, look, we’ll have results that will contribute to FRE in fourth quarter, but really turning the corner to 2026, these two flagship products and strategies will be what really drive our FRE earnings next year. And so, power is a big opportunity. If AI is a $7,000,000,000,000 opportunity, to power AI is probably somewhere about 1.3 to $1,500,000,000,000 of new infrastructure. So, you know, we look at that, we say, wow, that’s a lot of capital.

And our ambition is obviously not 1.3 to 1,500,000,000,000.0 of opportunity, but we definitely know that there’s a piece there for us, Just like there’s a piece for other asset managers. I think Brookfield talks a lot about this, powering the AI economy. And we agree with Bruce and Sam, they understand it, where it’s going, and KKR talks about it. And I’m sure Jonathan Gray will be talking about it next quarter. Power is important.

It’s the key ingredient to power this next generation of data centers. Now, as we build all this power and we build all these data centers, we have this, what I call, capital recycling problem. And all of us in the alternative asset management space today, we know what our challenge is, which is we have to return capital. It’s an absolute critical component. We talked about it on our quarterly call, in the last twenty four months, now probably more like thirty months, we’ve had nine exits and we’ve returned about 12,000,000,000 in DPI.

That’s a lot of capital to return back to LPs. And people ask, well why, how were you guys able to form over 28,000,000,000 of capital last year? Said, we returned a lot of capital. And this year we’re on a cadence to raise probably $20 plus billion of capital again between debt and equity. And again, how do we do it?

Well, we’re recycling capital. We’re putting capital back into our LPs pockets. At the same time, we’re also leveraging our platforms and we’re creating this road, this sort of freeway of conduit into the ABS and CMBS market. We’re a serial issuer into that space. We pioneered the cell tower securitization, the fiber securitization, data center securitization.

Anything around digital, we’ve been the pioneer of how to finance that from an esoteric perspective. And so that’s worked out really well for us. So we’ve been able to form capital. And that’s a big for the size of the firm we are, to essentially raise 20% to 25 of your capital base every year, that’s hard to do. But we’re doing it and we’re sort of punching above our weight class.

And the big opportunity in real estate is, I look at the real estate pool because of our merger Colony, we got to really understand the real estate business. And we had a real estate funds business, which we sold to Fortress. But when we sold that business, we had done a lot of work around sort of the TAM in real estate. And what we saw was a $3,900,000,000,000 LP marketplace shrinking to 3,700,000,000,000.0 and possibly shrinking further to 3.6 to 3,500,000,000,000.0. Now what is happening in alts?

Why is the real estate allocation shrinking and why are other asset classes growing like infrastructure? Which when I got an infrastructure a decade ago, infrastructure was like, you know, barely like 600,000,000,000. Today it’s 1,300,000,000,000.0 going to 1,500,000,000,000.0. And look, everyone agrees. I think Blackstone agrees, you know, Larry Fink agrees, and I’m sure Bruce Flatt agrees.

Infrastructure is a growing part of the vertical. And as we look in alts, everyone’s trying to get an infrastructure. Meanwhile real estate’s shrinking. I look at real estate and I’m sort of unconventional and I say, that’s an opportunity. I see that $3,700,000,000,000 pool of capital and I think, I can go compete for that.

Because what I’m selling is unique real estate. And so we launched a strategy to really focus on data center properties that are mature and that are income producing. And that really at the end of the day shouldn’t be sitting in a private equity fund or an infrastructure fund. They should be sitting in a real estate vehicle, where insurance companies and real estate allocators really appreciate yield and they appreciate safety. Those are really the two things that investment grade data centers can operate, so can offer to LPs.

So we’ve created a strategy to go out and own and operate the best investment grade data centers in the world. They’re not going to be cheap. We recognize that those assets are valuable. But we also recognize that we have great relationships with other GPs. We’ve done deals with every GP that I’ve mentioned on the stage today has been our partner before or is our partner today.

And the reality is we’ve already created some yield codes where we’ve recycled assets, we understand how to do it. The customers trust us because you need a consent when you transfer a data center, you need the customer approval. And I think other GPs trust us. My partner Ben worked at Blackstone for sixteen years and I ran a portfolio company for them and we have the highest respect for those guys. So we’re going to buy assets from other GPs.

We’re going to build a really sizable vehicle to go do this. It’ll be a big strategy for us. And we think we’re helping the ecosystem evolve. And the evolution of data centers is going be return of capital. And then ultimately pairing those assets correctly with the right form of equity and the right form of debt, where we can get investors, certain investors what they want, which is that yield and they want that safety.

Where they’re okay with a 10 to 13% IRR so long as the yield is somewhere between 57%. So I think Blue Owl talks a lot about that, the sort of pairing of liabilities against yields. And so we agree with Mark and his team on that. So that’s a big opportunity for us and so again, coming back to what we are at Digital Bridge and sort of putting a pin in all of this, it’s at the end of the day, it’s taking our expertise and the sort of, if this were a wheel and you had to think about hubs and spokes, the hub is our intense knowledge in digital and our discipline around underwriting and really being able to spot opportunities before others can spot them. If I can continue to do that, we’re going to continue to grow, raise capital, scale, and widen the aperture, which is what I’m trying to do right now.

At the same time, bring discipline and rigor and we’ve been very focused in the last two quarters cutting cost, improving margins. I’ve committed to grow our margins by 300 to 500 basis points this year. And we’re on the right track. We had a really good fourth quarter print. We had a very good first quarter print.

And I think as in our year as an asset manager, this will be our full year as an asset manager. It’s about building that relationship with these new investors, credibility, beating expectations, and really starting to explore how we get those shareholders to come to us.

Stephanie Ma, Member of the brokers, asset managers and exchanges team, Morgan Stanley Research: Great, thank you so much for the insightful conversation. We only got to about a of my questions.

Mark Gansey, CEO, Digital Bridge: I know, I’m sorry.

Stephanie Ma, Member of the brokers, asset managers and exchanges team, Morgan Stanley Research: But I don’t have to leave it there. Thank you so much Mark for joining

Mark Gansey, CEO, Digital Bridge: us appreciate it.

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