Infra Dig - A Green Street Podcast
Sep 18, 2026 · 33 min · 10 segments
AI infrastructure and data centres… it’s all anyone ever talks about these days. Given that it’s all the rage, if you haven’t knowledged up on the sector and don’t have a solid grasp on the…
Gianluca MinellaGuest
Angus Leslie MelvilleHost
I am optimistic for private infrastructure investors because what I've seen so far is that, especially on the equity side, where potentially some of these risks may materialize more meaningfully, Overall, the market has taken a prudent stance.
Infrastructure should not be the pioneer, it should be the settler on the equity side.
Clearly, fear of missing out is something that we increasingly see in the last few months.
And I think, so my concerns are growing a little bit, but overall, I think so far, private infrastructure investors can extract from this trend an attractive return while, to some extent, trying to mitigate the visible risks.
The main point for us is, however, that this sector and this trend are growing at a rapid speed, as we said at the beginning, and it's very difficult to track and understand the broader exposure that we were discussing about.
I was in Dubai last week for our Middle East and North Africa awards, postponed of course from April, and I was talking to some bankers and they were expressing deep concern over exposure to lending to sector and region.
I'm actually thinking about writing an editorial about it for this week.
Private credit is filling their boots in the secondary and increasingly coming into primary financing.
And I think that if there is one difference between bank lending and private credit... is that in many cases, private credit does not rely necessarily on ratings to execute transactions.
But often what I've seen in my experience is that thorough underlying long term credit analysis, which you would see priced in in the relative value of bonds, priced in in loans provided by banks, is still less present.
And I think, you know, there is still space for improving credit analysis there.
So I'm saying that, again, it's very important that also LPs committing to private credit funds ask themselves the questions.
How are GPs underwriting these transactions? How are they structuring them? What structural measures of protection are they including in the deals? And are they taking a through the cycle view in terms of credit exposure? to the underlying businesses that these data centers are financing? That's a very, very important question, I think.
You know, we're not talking about potentially spiking the falls, but we're talking about pricing in an adequate way a transaction, because ultimately you want to take an adequate level of compensation for the underlying risk, I think.
I am optimistic for private infrastructure investors because what I've seen so far is that, especially on the equity side, where potentially some of these risks may materialize more meaningfully, Overall, the market has taken a prudent stance.
Infrastructure should not be the pioneer, it should be the settler on the equity side.
Clearly, fear of missing out is something that we increasingly see in the last few months.
And I think, so my concerns are growing a little bit, but overall, I think so far, private infrastructure investors can extract from this trend an attractive return while, to some extent, trying to mitigate the visible risks.
The main point for us is, however, that this sector and this trend are growing at a rapid speed, as we said at the beginning, and it's very difficult to track and understand the broader exposure that we were discussing about.
I was in Dubai last week for our Middle East and North Africa awards, postponed of course from April, and I was talking to some bankers and they were expressing deep concern over exposure to lending to sector and region.
I'm actually thinking about writing an editorial about it for this week.
Private credit is filling their boots in the secondary and increasingly coming into primary financing.
And I think that if there is one difference between bank lending and private credit... is that in many cases, private credit does not rely necessarily on ratings to execute transactions.
But often what I've seen in my experience is that thorough underlying long term credit analysis, which you would see priced in in the relative value of bonds, priced in in loans provided by banks, is still less present.
And I think, you know, there is still space for improving credit analysis there.
So I'm saying that, again, it's very important that also LPs committing to private credit funds ask themselves the questions.
How are GPs underwriting these transactions? How are they structuring them? What structural measures of protection are they including in the deals? And are they taking a through the cycle view in terms of credit exposure? to the underlying businesses that these data centers are financing? That's a very, very important question, I think.
You know, we're not talking about potentially spiking the falls, but we're talking about pricing in an adequate way a transaction, because ultimately you want to take an adequate level of compensation for the underlying risk, I think.
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