"A.I. Needs Power, Land and Data Centers. Bruce Flatt’s $1 Trillion Brookfield Already Owns Much of It." (BAM)

As noted introducing August 22's "Who Really Runs Canada? Inside Mark Carney’s Influence Network": 

It used to be Desmarais and Power Corporation of Canada and Maurice Strong and that whole crowd. 

Now I think it's Brookfield that's in charge....

The Prime Minister was Chairman of the (very) large asset manager prior to his current gig. 

 

From Observer, September 29: 

 

From Westinghouse nuclear reactors to a $100 billion A.I. infrastructure program, Flatt and 38-year-old CEO Connor Teskey are pushing Brookfield into every layer of the buildout as Blackstone, KKR and BlackRock race to compete. 

“It took us 25 years to be in the right spot,” Bruce Flatt, chairman of Brookfield Asset Management, told investors at the firm’s New York investor day on Sept. 17. He was talking about artificial intelligence. Long before ChatGPT triggered a mad dash for raw compute, Brookfield spent decades building up what has become the physical backbone of today’s A.I. race, from power plants and renewable-energy projects to utilities, industrial businesses and even the nuclear reactor maker Westinghouse.

The A.I. boom isn’t running on algorithms alone, but needs land, data centers and staggering amounts of electricity. That puts Brookfield, the Wall Street investment giant managing more than $1 trillion, in an unusually advantageous position. Now the firm is pushing into nearly every layer of the A.I. buildout, financing computing equipment, developing sprawling data center campuses and striking multibillion-dollar power deals from France to South Korea.

Connor Teskey, who succeeded Flatt as CEO of the asset management arm in February, was even more direct: “A.I. infrastructure and A.I. is undoubtedly the biggest theme at Brookfield today,” he said. At 38, Teskey is one of the youngest executives to run a firm of Brookfield’s size. Flatt stayed on as chair of the asset manager, a seat previously held by Mark Carney before he entered politics and became Canada’s prime minister.

By Teskey’s estimate, between 25 percent and 40 percent of Brookfield’s global activity now touches digital infrastructure growth in some fashion. The opportunity is also reshaping assets the firm already controls. Land once earmarked for solar or battery projects is, in some cases, being reevaluated as a data center site, where surging demand for computing capacity can produce more attractive economics.

Brookfield’s pitch rests on a simple premise: Much of what A.I. needs looks remarkably similar to the long-lived infrastructure and cash-generating businesses it has been buying up for decades.

Flatt, a Winnipeg-born accountant who joined Brookfield’s predecessor, Brascan, in 1990, built his career around infrastructure, real estate and businesses capable of generating steady cash flows over long periods. That approach helped transform Brookfield into one of the world’s largest alternative asset managers. Flatt also serves as CEO of Toronto-based Brookfield Corporation, the broader investment company from which Brookfield Asset Management was spun out in 2022. The New York-headquartered asset manager trades on both the New York and Toronto stock exchanges.

The philosophy helps explain the firm’s enthusiasm for what private equity chief Anuj Ranjan described at investor day as “boring businesses”: companies that are easily overlooked while investors chase flashier technology bets.

“People are chasing the toy, the A.I. toy, and they are forgetting about industrial businesses,” Flatt said at investor day. Brookfield is not the only investment giant angling for a piece of A.I.’s physical backbone. Rivals are assembling war chests of their own.

In May, Blackstone committed an initial $5 billion to a venture with Google that will offer customers computing capacity built around Google’s custom A.I. chips. The following month, KKR and partners unveiled Helix Digital Infrastructure with more than $10 billion in committed capital to finance and build data centers, power infrastructure and networks. KKR tapped former AWS chief Adam Selipsky to lead the effort.

BlackRock, meanwhile, teamed up with Microsoft and Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX in 2024 to pursue $30 billion in equity for A.I. data centers and supporting energy infrastructure. With debt financing added to the mix, the group says the initiative could eventually mobilize up to $100 billion in total investment....

....MUCH MORE 

Brookfield is 51% owner of Westinghouse while a member of our hyper-concentrated electricity mini-portfolio, uranium miner Cameco (CCJ) owns the 49%.