DigitalBridge Group, Inc. (DBRG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

For Gene and Alex, you're both on the Board of Highline, which is our first funds Latin American telecom tower investment based in Brazil. Maybe some sort of overview around what we're doing there but also more broadly around how in the telecom tower space, Alex, how our portfolio companies cooperate and what we're doing to bring them together?

Yes, sure. So Highline is an investment we made back in 2019 it was really where we identified an exceptional management team that we wanted to back to grow from about a couple of hundred towers in Brazil to now well over 10,000 towers which was done really by working in partnership with them to grow organically through build-to-suit but also through M&A by acquiring a number of platforms and really having somebody like Alex in the boardroom, who's able to kind of share knowledge and brainstorm with the management team has been incredibly value additive. And what I personally really enjoy is that this learning and brainstorming goes both ways. So the local management team is taking some lessons learned or some items from the United States market, but vice versa. I think you've even kind of probably brought some new ideas from Brazil to the business here, which I think is very value additive.

Yes. And I think the way I look at it, I think sort of Gene and Steven and the DigitalBridge team have given them a layer of discipline around how they function not always they're that excited about it, but they're good. And I more have like a mentorship relationship with the CEO. We're pretty close but we talk about like carrier agreements and what's happening in the U.S., what's -- every market is different. But really, out of that experience and also being on the Edge Point Board, what we've started to do, we've just had our second annual is we have a tower summit -- a DigitalBridge has a tower summit, which is we said, hey, we all pay money to a third party to go to these meetings to not talk about what we're really doing, right, because they're our competitors. So like we have 11 tower companies worldwide. Why don't we do it ourselves? So we just had our second one in London in April, really, I think, very positive feedback because we all get out of it, two or three really good new ideas from our peer group around the world that we would never get any other way. So I think that's something that DigitalBridge and only DigitalBridge can do.

Excellent. Maybe that's it in terms of my questions for the panel. Thank you very much, everyone, for your time, and thanks, everyone, for being here today.

Thank you Liam, Alex, Tom, Gene. So now we're going to move into the AI section. And we're slightly behind, so I'm going to move a little quicker. I've been told to move it along very politely. And look, at the end of the day, every customer that we do business with is involved in AI in the ecosystem. And so the networks need to evolve, and we talked about it earlier, where do we start? Where do we go from language-based models to inference degenerative AI and that journey in the arc of where data is going to migrate to? Ultimately, at the end of the day, we know two things will hold up. You're going to need more capacity and you're going to need faster connections, which equate to lower latency. And so these are kind of the truisms that hold up around what we're doing around AI. And so first, what did we learn in the last year? The ecosystem is exploded probably a little faster than we all thought. And obviously, Chat is super important, but it's the ecosystem around Chat that fascinates me and that there are customers emerging and evolving very rapidly, very quickly that are spending money on CapEx that are spending some of that CapEx with us, and we're taking wallet share there. While it's easy to talk about chat and OpenAI, it was much like the cloud. There's a lot happening in the cloud and the initial infancy, but really what got us super excited around leasing and activity was the ecosystem in the cloud because they were taking enterprise data center space early. They were taking access on our fiber networks. That narrative is exactly playing out in AI, which is exciting. So the ecosystem is adapting and it's exploding at the same time. So it's really exciting. And then along with that comes these massive language-based models and they're growing exponentially, but guess what else is growing exponentially? CapEx, hundreds of millions dollars of CapEx are being spent to build these models. And this is not a typo. And you can hear it on the cloud calls with the customers, they're telling you that they're going to be spending billions and billions of dollars of CapEx. They're spending it with us, which is really exciting. And then ultimately, the amount of data and the amount of GPU is needed. NVIDIA has been a great customer of ours at Vantage for 6 years, and we've grown with NVIDIA. We're now growing with CoreWeave. We're providing space, power and cooling to CoreWeave, but we're also providing capital to CoreWeave and that's another example of how this ecosystem, this TAM is growing, where our ecosystem is evolving, and we're taking advantage of that. We're now going into the second CoreWeave loan, and we're providing capital to them outside of our flagship strategy, which is exactly what we hope you'll take away from today is that there are opportunities to work with our customers in new ways as we've expanded our product offering and as we raise more capital. But the key here is the GPU space is exploding. And with other competitors NVIDIA coming, we're having those conversations with those customers that are requiring not only megawatts of power, but some of our customers are asking for gigawatts of power. That's the size and the enormity of what's happening in the AI infrastructure side. And ultimately, it's reshaping and accelerating the investment. This I thought was one of the more interesting slides that we're going to show you today. As you see CapEx down below and the right there bumping along, and then all of a sudden, you see 2024 and 2025. This is not a typo. This is billions of dollars of data center CapEx coming. This is the wall of CapEx that we're all chasing right here. $72 billion and $100 billion of CapEx. You heard it from Jon earlier, where it's going to be -- once we build through these next 90 data centers, we'll be over 7 gigawatts, but we have a pipeline of another 7 gigawatts behind it where we can ultimately get to about 14 gigawatts of data center capacity. So we're taking market share. We're taking wallet. But guess what, that wallet is massive, and it's big. And there's plenty of room, not only for us, but for others as well. And look, our ecosystem is really critical. The way we think about data centers is not the same way that other GPs think about data centers. Most of the other GPs have one platform in the data center space, good platforms. We think about it differently. We have 10 different investment vehicles in the data center space, focused really in sort of 4 core swim lanes. One, edge computing, for example, where databank sits, where AIM sits, we're AtlasEdge sets; two, public cloud, you heard from Vantage earlier, Scala in Latin America, one of the great businesses that we own, then working further up into private cloud. We talked about Switch and the importance of how interesting what Switch is doing and providing those workloads that are highly secure but really in a private cloud environment. And now this new fourth vertical, which is really AI and building AI data centers. Data centers are not one business model. It's not one business plan. We think about it in two dimensions, how to ultimately build capacity for customers that are specific to the technology they're trying to develop and deliver. And then we think about it geographically, 5 different continents where we're building data centers today and we're showing up for customers. And ultimately, that manifests itself here on the left with our platforms, Vantage and Scala doing public cloud, Switch in private cloud and then on the edge interconnection side, Databank, AIMS and of course, AtlasEdge. So we do think about this ultimately as different business models, different customers with different requirements for space power and cooling and security and connectivity. The data center sector is complex, you have to understand the customers and you have to build the right products to match what the customers want. For us owning one data center company on a global basis makes no sense. This is about differentiation. And it's been ultimately delivering for customers in a very specific way, which is why we're taking more market share, which is why we're raising more capital, and we're growing AUM at the same time and then matching our customers with those workloads. And then the ecosystem. We just talked about the data centers, but ultimately, to deliver these AI models, like I said earlier in the -- Alex said earlier, most of this is going to happen on your mobile device. To make that happen isn't just about data centers. It's about providing the fiber. It's about providing the macro sites, the small cells, the edge infrastructure, and all of this is exploding in the next 7, 8 years, not just in data centers. AI is about the ecosystem and understanding data gravity and how data proliferates towards the edge and what is required to deliver that data and those solution sets for customers, that's about convergence. That's about the flywheel. That's about what we've created at DigitalBridge. It's so unique and that is now powering and scaling over the next 5 years. So the power issue. It's front and central. And to set it up, it's really simple. This is easy, I'm looking at Christian right now because he knows exactly what I'm talking about. This stuff is power hungry, like we've never seen before. And ultimately, what you're seeing is these densities. You saw it in the video, 5x, 10x more density at the rack level, at the GPU level, different cooling requirements. You go back 10 years ago in the data centers Christian had a Microsoft Power data center cooling from under the ground, raise floor cooling coming up. Then we went to public cloud, we started cooling from the sides, started putting cooling equipment from the sites. Now in AI, I was at an AI data center, which I will not disclose the location because I was not allowed to say it, but all the cooling was from above, liquid cooling coming down on the data center. And a 1 megawatt workload, half the size of this stage, 3 racks, 1 megawatt right here all being cooled not from below, not from the sides but from the top and through liquid cooling. That's power density. And ultimately, customers want it, they want it now, and they want it cheaper because they're demanding more power in a smaller and tighter footprint. So what's the conundrum? Power is constrained. I feel like I'm a bit of a broken record because I've been going around to conferences for the last two years evangelizing the fact that our transmission infrastructure is unfortunately not up to the task of what we need to do in terms of that 50 gigawatts of new data center capacity that we need to deliver as an industry over the next 3 to 4 years. But fascinatingly enough, Elon Musk says it at a conference 90 days ago and all of a sudden, it's a talking point. But here's the problem. The problem is that we can generate sufficient power. We just can't transmit it efficiently and at the right cost basis. And at the same time, eat into some of the standards that some of our customers have signed up for in 2030 around getting the green power. So this is a real conundrum. It's multiple problems that we're trying to solve for here. And ultimately, we got to find a solution. It's two solutions, right? One, we can bring the power to the data center or you bring the data center to the power. Those are kind of the two ideas. And ultimately, we know that we're going to have to probably do a little bit of both. And we also know that power is tricky. Wind and solar are not exactly the most reliable providers of power. So there's not an exact one-to-one correlation. If I go build 100 gigawatt solar farm, that does not translate into 100 gigawatts of data center capacity. You have loss. So maybe if I build 100 megawatts of solar, I'm getting anywhere from 35 to 60 megawatts of power that actually gets to the data center. Same thing in wind. If I build 100 gigawatts of wind, maybe I get 30 to 50 to 60 gigawatts of wind that ends up in the data center. So we have these fluctuations, right? And wind and solar, and it's -- by the way, very reliant on time of day. Because guess what, at Sunset, we lose solar. In certain parts of the day, we lose wind. And ultimately, these solutions are going to be hybrid solutions. And look, there's no one single bullet that's going to solve this problem. And you're going to hear from a panel of experts in a second, you'll hear from Alex, you'll hear from Christian, you'll hear from Jon. And we've taken a very pragmatic approach. We've been at this for two years. We didn't start yesterday, worrying about power. We've been busy at work on this for a long time. And it's a combination. Ultimately, the type of infrastructure that we're going to build and own and operate will be a hybrid because it's a pragmatic approach to solving the problem. And there's not one solution. At the same time, we're all on the clock related to some of the requirements that our customers have around getting to carbon neutral. So at the end of the day, again, we've been focused on it. We've been working on it. Switch and Scala are poster childs, 100% renewable, different ways they've gone about it. But for example, Scala uses hydro, leased transmission infrastructure. We own our own substation. We bring that power into [indiscernible] and we provide uninterrupted renewable power. And we do have an interconnection agreement back to the grid in case we do have moments where that power is not contiguous. Same approach we've taken at switch. We've used PPAs, we've used solar, we've used wind, we've used hydro, we've used all sorts of solutions at switch, and I give Rob Roy and the team a lot of credit. They identified this as an issue 11 years ago. And then we have our kids that are progressing. Databank and [ Manage], same thing, using a combination of PPAs using a combination of alternative sources of energy directly to the data center. We've used LNG in one location for Vantage, and we're thinking about other forms of alternative energy at DataBank, where our data centers are a little bit smaller. And ultimately, our goal is to get to net zero 2030, it's going to be hard. It's going to be hard. We're going to need the grid. Because at the end of the day, renewable energy has an inconsistency to it, where you have to be interconnected and you have to be able to bring power from the grid in off-peak hours, which is great because in off-peak, we can buy it at an effective rate. But the goal is we've been working at this two years and we're progressing and more ideas to follow and more execution coming. So what's the big deal? It's really simple. Most of you know that New York City spends about 5.5 gigawatts per day. That's about the draw here in New York City. So if you think about what we're doing, we're thinking about we're building 30 gigawatts over the next five years. So we're effectively building five New York cities in the next five years in terms of power demand and power consumption. It's a big, big, big pull. But the good news is we've got great people, we've got great partners that worry about this and think about this. So with that, I'm going to ask Severin to come on up and lead a panel with Jon Mauck, Christian Belady and Alex Hernandez.

All right, everyone. So hopefully, you can hear me. We've got Jon Mauck, who you've met and heard from before. Let me do a quick intro to Christian and Alex. Christian is a special adviser to DigitalBridge. He joined us from Microsoft, where he served for 16 years in a number of senior roles, including heading their global data center strategy. Fun fact that Marc mentioned earlier, he's coined the term PUE or power usage effectiveness that defines the industry measure of the efficiency of a data center. So really an incredible pioneer in the data center space and focused on kind of what we're doing in technology. Alex is a senior adviser as well to DigitalBridge focused on the convergence of energy and digital infrastructure globally. Previously, he was the Founder and CEO of Cumulus Data, the first hyperscale data center platform directly connected to carbon-free nuclear power. Cumulus Data was sold to Amazon in March of 2024, not too long ago for over $600 million. He served previously as the CEO of Talen Energy, one of the largest competitive power companies in North America with 15 gigawatts of power, and he's got experience also in selling term called TerraForm Power, which is a large renewables platform to Brookfield. So you've been a builder of businesses and an operator of businesses in our ecosystem. So I'm going to start it off with -- Marc pointed out some of the breakthroughs that we've seen in Chat GPT and more broadly, kind of Gen AI, they're starting to get felt in the data center space. And maybe Jon, you can talk about the pipeline, give us a sense of what's happening on the ground, maybe some historical context for this explosion.

Yes. Great question. And it is an incredibly exciting time to be in this space. I would say out of everyone in the room, I'm probably having the most fun right now to be honest. So I just want to -- this is a really exciting macro opportunity. We have seen the size of this market effectively double being driven by AI, and it's impacting everything we do and every way we think about deploying infrastructure. So when we talk about AI as a specific category, but it's also influencing impact in the way we think about every engagement we have, every application, every device, every cloud opportunity. If I was to step back and say, what do I want to -- what you think about this? Maybe the most important thing is that we are agnostic as to AI, cloud and the growth of the digital economy. We are providing that service, that infrastructure that everyone needs. So whether it's NVIDIA, AMD, it's Amazon, Google, Microsoft, they all need this physical layer to bring in digital grade energy to bring in cooling to manage that heat, the connectivity and the physical parameters around that. And that's what we're focused on. So we are agnostic as the technology inside of it. We're also, by the way, an intermediary in the power, but we don't take power risk. We're passing that cost through in almost every case which I think is really interesting, and I think gives us great alignment to the questions, and we want to solve that for our customers. But we're also -- if there are spikes in power actually, that's not when we take financial risk on, which is really important. The other macro-thematic, and Marc touched on this, is we have 10 different businesses, 6 different logos in the data center space that we're working on. Each one is focused on the swim lane where they can deliver the most highly differentiated value. We have different businesses for a very specific reason, right? They find the opportunity where they can deliver the most value. They can partner with customers. We can match capital against that specific opportunity and we say, what is the swim lane where you can really drive value creation. And so as opposed to having one answer for the world and for every kind of data center, that's a big part of it, which I think to your question about how we think about where we're going, where we sit today, that's a big part of how we got here with our portfolio.

Yes. Christian, Jon mentioned earlier, you were -- had built Microsoft's first data center. What are you seeing today that's different or the same that with AI and the influence that's having on development?

Well, I think Marc touched on some of it, which was density is going to be a big shift. In general, the technologies are similar. There are some changes happening like liquid cooling, which liquid cooling has been around in the computer industry decades ago when I was still a young man. But ultimately, what we are seeing is that there's going to be a bigger need to outsource capacity. If I look at -- back in the days when I was running a data center strategy for Microsoft, we actually went out, we realized with the cloud growing rapidly, we couldn't actually go out and build all of it ourselves. We had to actually rely on partnerships and partners, such as Vantage and some of the other players. And now with AI, this is even a steeper ramp in that no one anticipated and it's going to be even much more important to develop the partnerships with all the companies out there for the hyperscalers because there is no way in hell that they'll be able to scale on their own. The scale is going to be so large that it has to move from being more of a -- from being a transactional kind of relationship to truly integrated and collaborative future as all of these players play together. And that's ultimately what attracted me to DigitalBridge is I see the opportunity being so enormous.

How do you see that geographically playing out or by region? Is there some distinction where you say, "Hey, listen, internationally, there's a certain dynamic domestically or even hyperscale down to kind of, call it, the metro?"

I mean, I think, ultimately, most of the growth will first happen in the U.S. But ultimately, it's going to be everywhere. So whatever is done anywhere in the U.S. will happen everywhere. So I don't really see that much difference from that perspective. I think the growth will be everywhere.

Yes, interesting. And when you think about what that looks like, I get a lot of questions about what does an AI data center look like differently? How is that different? Marc talked a little bit about the density of some of that. What are you looking at in terms of from a technology standpoint? How do we meet that not just in building more, but doing things more efficiently?

Yes. Ultimately, AI data centers are going to be driving all of the technology shifts in the future. The density itself, just driving to liquid cooling is changing the form factors, as Marc was talking about earlier, of data centers. So the density is going to be going up. So the more exotic cooling systems are going to be coming in. There's also going to be a lot in terms of networking. We'll also have to change because instead of hierarchical network architectures. It's going to be much more point to point. So there's going to be a lot of innovation in that space that's going to have to take place. And so I know there's a lot of hyperscalers that are looking at free space optics as well. So there's really a lot going on there. And then certainly on the power side, which I know Alex will have a lot to say about, there's going to be a lot more work in how do you actually make the data centers be in the kind of a load that could disappear more flexibility to participate in the episodic nature of even renewables for data centers to kind of go offline and go just on local generation, their own generation, for example. So I think a lot of innovation, you already see grid interactive UPS is coming in place. So a lot of new technology will be helping us be much more flexible. And again, going back to the partnerships, this is why it's so important to have these partnerships because the grid and the data center ecosystem are going to have to play together. It's no longer just you're giving me power, and I'm taking it, there's going to be give and take across that interface, which I think is going to be a big part of the future.

Yes. And Alex, you've been kind of at the center of helping us think about how that intersection plays out between power. You've got experience in that area. And tell us how you look at power and data centers historically, maybe today, how does that have to change?

Thank you, Severin, delighted to be with all of you today. So the power business is a data center business and the data center business is a power business. These are two worlds that to date have never been connected. They're converging at a rate that I think few in the world understand until now. And the reality is we're at the beginning of a new era in my opinion, where the electric industry, as it's set up today is ill suited to meet this exponential demand, right? The utility monopolies that have generally adjudicated this demand, have not seen the signal coming, are not set up to invest, have not made the investments and the constraint to all of this growth by the largest 10 market cap companies in the world is going to be how do you connect to power. And I think our answer here is that it's going to be a re-architecture of the power industry, where data is going to go where low carbon, low cost, reliable energy is, and that energy is going to be transported via fiber, right? That is not how the world is set up today. And I think about this as a little bit as a Rockefeller moment. And for those of you that know history of power, the first power plant in the U.S. was built steps away from where we are here on Pearl Street. You may remember power moved to Niagara later on, and it led to a fundamental re-architecture of the way that the power industry works. My view is we're at that moment now, driven by the forces Christian that you mentioned, which is increasing innovation around GPUs and AI, increasing power density at the chip level, at the cabinet level, at the data center level, increasing scale at a scale that we've not seen to date, and you can't solve it with the solution today. So imagine a new map, and I think all of the platforms that you talked about, Jon, are at the center of that re-architecture, which is just an exciting place to be.

This conversation is so interesting because as we think about this from outside and holistically, the question is, how do we take insight from AI and the demand requirements and what that means to support the growth of compute and the digitization of every economic process, all the way through the infrastructure, the power generation side, right? And it's that holistic perspective, which I think is a great differentiator, not just today, but thinking about as you said, how we change the way the landscape looks. What's the plan for the next 10 years. And to us, this is an incredibly exciting sort of inflection point, but discussion that we're having on a daily basis.

With huge opportunity.

You talked about the platforms and business building. And I think part of the differentiation and all the platforms you've talked about, it's going to require an industrial solution. You can't fix it with capital structure, you can't fix it with leverage. You can't fix it, you have to fix it industrially. And I think our belief here is that, that industrial solution, driven by all the ecosystem that we talked about earlier, is actually going to enable the growth, going to enable the scale and at the same time, to the extent one can solve the power issue creatively and industrially, in my opinion, that's a tremendous source of alpha for the investment community. It's also an enormous source of value for our customers that we serve. To the extent we can do those together, again, at the industrial level, not at the financial level, that's how you solve this big problem.

So one of the questions we get around the kind of we see the demand coming. But what are the financial implications, John, When it comes to that in terms of how it's impacted development yields just from an investment standpoint, how we look at that? Has it changed in different verticals, whether you're at the hyperscale or edge or what's happening to development yields?

Yes. It's a great question, right? I mean we are excited to be aligned with this fundamental opportunity, but we're also in the business of deploying capital smartly, right. And so as we think about it, at each company, as we look at the opportunities to actually develop data center capacity, we're being very selective to make sure we actually understand where we're building, what we're building for, right, the connectivity and the long-term strategic planning around that. We're not just taking every day to sign a deal that comes in the door, right? We're trying to really curate that list, because of the current supply-demand dynamic, it has resulted in yields generally going up. We've seen constraint on new capacity in many markets around the world today. We talked about some in the video like Northern Virginia, for example, but others Amsterdam, Singapore, Dublin, where if you have a data center in place at renewal, you can expect to see the average pricing per KW go up materially in some places. On the supply chain side, we talked about earlier, we're trying to have insight into the supply chain so we can actually understand the cost. As a result of all that, we've seen a very attractive backdrop, and we've seen yields increase despite the cost of capital this past year despite the volatility. And so fundamentally, we think this is a very strong position in terms of the opportunity. As we deploy capital, we're being very smart about making sure it's the highest and best dollar we can deploy, not only from a return, but long-term partnership, right? How are we a good partner as we think about this transformation in the economy.

Yes, that's great. And that jumps to -- we talked a little bit about power the aspects of that, that we've covered as well as this idea of renewables and how that factors in. Maybe, Alex, you can talk a little bit about that and Christian as well, maybe that perspective from one of the large hyperscalers thinking about renewable, how does that get integrated? How do you solve that?

Yes. Well, thanks, Severin. Renewables is an important part of the solution, but I'd say the customer and we are trying to solve what we call the energy trilemma, which is you have to find power that is low cost, that is low carbon and that is reliable. Finding 2 of the 3 is easy, doing 3 of the 3 is very difficult. And so renewables absolutely will play a big part of the solution. But the reality is we can only cover with renewables roughly half the day and maybe a little bit more when you incorporate batteries and you still need the grid to do that, right. But clearly, given the growth of renewables, that will be an important part of the solution, especially as renewable campuses grow very largely. But we've got to take an all-the-above strategy. Natural gas has to play a part as a stabilizing fuel that can get us through the 24 hours. Carbon-free nuclear has to play a part. There's 94 operating nuclear reactors today in the United States. And to solve the scale when you start talking about 54 gigawatts of capacity, which is a number, I think, on one of Marc's slides, that's roughly 1/3 of the load in PJM that exists, right? And so you're going to have to make use of every source not just one source to get there to meet this challenge.

And I think it goes back to the point Chris made earlier, that also means working with the customer to understand what their loads are. So we can actually start being more intelligent about when we're bringing data centers, where we put them, what the requirements are. It's got to be a holistic solution. .

Yes. The work that's being done there, it has to be coming from both sides, which goes back to this whole notion of really intimate collaboration. And again, certainly, it's the scale that we have that we can now work with all these different players, not just as a one-off kind of collaboration, but really this integrated view across all the platforms.

Yes. Interesting. So Jon, a question for you. We've got 6 data center platforms on a global basis. How do you think about kind of the implications of AI across those different spaces? Some of them are geographic in nature. Some of them are kind of customer-specific as opposed to big versus small. How do we think about building this kind of...

Yes. Well, so again, as Christian said, the strategy is really started in North America, but going global. So we see the same opportunity on a global basis, every region of the world. So from that standpoint, we think it's going to be continued to take the playbook and apply it. As we think about the different swim lanes or different strategies, again, edge, the creation of nonzone where we actually generate the algorithms, right, or AI data centers, the cloud availability zones, which you're talking about for 10 years or you connect to the cloud. These are all part of a broader ecosystem, right? And again, none of these exist in a vacuum. A data center is a data center because of the content inside and the connected footprint to another data center or to end users or to where models generated. So all of this has to be thought of as a topology or an ecosystem where we actually support what happens from a compute or the digital economy. So from that standpoint, there's a lot of collaboration across the portfolio today, whether it be from the cloud footprint to distributed compute footprints to the private cloud, where there may be similar conversations, but they actually can work together to really be complementary companies together with the fiber business, which goes back to the point I made earlier, if we take compute to where power is generated, what's important is to understand the fiber topology to get back to where it's going to be used. And so as we think about that trade off, again, Zayo and the fiber businesses, for example, are part of that solution. It all goes together.

We're starting to see the emergence of some new players kind of in the AI cloud space, Dean and his team on the credit side provided some backing to CoreWeave late last year. What's your sense of -- I know their customers have Switch and of DataBank as well, this rise of kind of the specialized AI cloud provider. Is that something that you see accelerating?

Well, without talking about any company-specific I think there is significant demand for AI as a service where you're seeing certain applications being created and hosted. The GPU model is very significant from an investment standpoint. And to the extent you have to aggregate that cost and share it over many customer opportunities, it makes a lot of sense. So we see real opportunity to support those companies as they grow. And again, being agnostic to the technology and who provides a technology, it puts in a very attractive footprint to benefit all that growth in AI or growth in cloud and digital compute.

Terrific. Last question for Alex, in terms of some of the opportunities you see ahead, right? Like if you look forward and say, okay, we've got this issue. We're dealing with it. What do we have to do? What's the -- what do we need to accomplish to kind of solve that? What you started off talking about intersection of the data centers, the power, that powers the data center?

It's interesting. I think innovation and growth is going to continue, in my opinion, unequivocally, right. And so what's required is you started to see a little bit of that convergence financially by the valuation multiples of the electric world, whether that's the merchant, competitive power producers, utilities, et cetera, as people begin to realize that these worlds are in fact, colliding and converging very rapidly. What's needed now is a little bit of industrial ingenuity, right, of actually executing it because there's a lot of discussion about how to do it, but you actually need to invest capital, develop, begin to put that solution in place so that it's in place, as Marc said, 2 to 4 years ago when that wave of demand comes in, right? So what's required in my opinion, is action. There's been a lot of work said. An action at the industrial level to make that solution possible and actually connect many places in the U.S. on that, by the way, have excess power, but don't have data. And I think that's where we go next.

And I think it's important just to say that we see the -- all of these sources of power, right, as a partner, we'll bring into that dialogue. It's a solution that we create with the customer who has the compute. We can manage the infrastructure. We could bring power into that. And so again, I think it's a partnership on the power side, partnerships on the customer side, I think that lets us be the middle here to really create the value. .

Yes, terrific. Well, Christian, maybe one last question for you. Just in terms of beyond partnerships, I know you participated kind of in one of our operating partner panel discussions or meetings where we got together. What was your -- do you have any kind of takeaways from that experience in terms of opportunities or...

So that's a great question. So opportunities, certainly, I think the thing we've already talked about partnerships, but I do believe there needs to be much more investment -- longer-term investment in just technologies. One of the groups I led was an R&D group where the real frustration is there's no real commitment to invest out into the future, even some of -- Alex and I were talking about this, is, we know that we need certain things in the future, but there's a 10-year runway and we're not investing in it today, and we'll invest in the last minute. And I think the real opportunity is to really look more long term. And one of the struggles that the hyperscalers have is they are quarterly driven. And I've talked to Jon about this, too, is you need more patient kind of a time line to really invest for that future.

Yes. Listen, I think one of the silver linings today is that you now have a lot of really smart people at some of these global hyperscalers focused on this issue, right, that maybe weren't 5, 10 years ago.

And at DigitalBridge.

Yes, that's exactly right. And that's why I'm here.

No, and -- working together. Yes. Good. We'll end on that and thank the panel for their participation. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Thank you guys. It's great to be a part here.

Thanks. Thank you. Yes. Thanks. Our new CFO, why don't you come on up. Well, you've got the clicker.

Okay. Thanks, Severin. And I just want to thank Marc and Ben, the rest of the management team and our Board for giving me the opportunity to be here today and continue the great work that Jackie Wu has done over the last 4 years. Jack and I talked just about every day, and he's been super helpful to me in my transition. I've been in the seat as a CFO for a little bit less than 2 months now, and I couldn't be more excited about the opportunity that we have ahead of us. I'm going to talk about the financial side of our business. I'm not as smart as some of the other people who can explain edge computing or how many megawatts it takes to run a data center. So I'm going to keep it really simple. We have strong revenue growth. We've got a very simple financial model, and we have clear priorities for how we allocate our capital. Before I do that, I do get a lot of questions about my background and why I chose to join DigitalBridge. So I figured I'd touch on those really quickly. I started my career in public accounting, but I spent the last 25 years in the alternatives industry. Majority of that at the Carlyle Group, and then I spent about 5 years before DigitalBridge as the CFO and Chief Operating Officer at a smaller diversified alternative manager. Although when I joined Carlyle in 2000, we didn't call it alternatives. They called firms like Blackstone and KKR and Carlyle Buyout Firms. So that's really kind of all people did. But I was fortunate to join at a real inflection point as these firms started to diversify geographically and expand the asset classes that they were involved in a number of the firms went public and have become truly global investment firms. So I had the opportunity to work across just about every asset class within the alternative space, from real estate to buyouts, infrastructure, hedge funds, permanent capital vehicles and everything in between. And over that time, seen the life cycle of funds from an idea on a whiteboard to a launch the monetizations and kind of launching of successor funds 2 and 3 across the way. So to steal a phrase from the technology industry, I've been a part of the hyperscaler growth in the alternative space. I'm not even sure how good the data was when I started, but I think the industry was probably around $1 trillion. Now I think one of the other slides said $16 trillion, and I'm sure we'll be headed towards $20 trillion pretty soon. So it's been a really interesting opportunity for me to learn what it takes to grow an investment firm over a long period of time. So why DigitalBridge? So you've heard about the secular tailwinds. Like investing is hard, raising capital is hard and generating premium returns for our investors is hard. So it's always good to have a little bit of wind at your back. That said, I've also been around long enough to see what it takes to be successful over a long period of time, not just when the current is flowing in your direction. You have to be an expert at something, you have to have a differentiated value that you deliver to your customers. And I do think about the LPs and our funds other customers. For any business, you have to give your customers something that's unique that they can't get somewhere else. And I think we absolutely provide that to our investors and our funds. We provide them with compelling investment opportunities that are differentiated that they can't easily replace in their portfolios. The team, look, this is a people business. So when I thought about joining the team is super important to me. Marc is a visionary and a force of nature and the kind of person you want to be aligned with. We also have a really strong and deep management team. I probably use sports analogies a little bit too much. But they say quarterback is usually the most important position in all sports. But if you have a team, a football team of all quarterbacks, you're not going to win a lot of games. But I think we've got a fantastic management team that has a lot of complementary skill sets and it's going to help us win a lot of games. And lastly, the ability to add value. You always want to be somewhere where you can make a real contribution. And I think I can do that here at DigitalBridge. I think I can help Marc and the rest of the team continue to grow and scale the business and institutionalize it without squashing the entrepreneurial spirit you need in this business. A lot of times in this business, success is about being creative. And as Marc likes to say, thinking around the corner. And I think it can help the firm grow institutionalized without sacrificing that. So enough about me. So our historical financials. As we've pivoted the business to a pure play asset manager, our fee earning assets have grown almost 3x over the last 4 years. And in that time, our fee revenue has grown more than 3x, almost 4x. And as we've done that, we've diversified the asset base, notably with the launch of the credit business, and the acquisition of InfraBridge. And that's reduced our reliance on the separately capitalized portfolio companies on which we earn fees, but not a carry. It's also resulted in our fee-related earnings growing consistently over the last couple of years. So look, our business has historically been very complicated. The team has done an amazing job pivoting, as Marc talked about in the opening from a quite a complex business to one that really now is quite simple. We raise assets from investors. We typically earn a long-term contracted fee on those assets. We also earn carry, but right now just focus on the fees. Our average is around 90 basis points. Some of our fund products are higher than that. Some of the co-investments are a little bit lower than that. But typically, we average out to about 90 basis points. So you'll see 2022, we had $20 billion of, on average over the course of the year, $20 billion of FEEUM and generated $176 million of fee revenue. And that kind of rate has held steady throughout the last few years. We've also realized the benefits of operating leverage as we scale. Our FRE has grown faster than revenue growth for the last few years, and we forecast that to continue this year. So how do we think about the future beyond this year? As mentioned, I spent 18 years at Carlyle, while I was there, we doubled in size about every 5 years. Some periods, there was a little bit more than that, some periods is a little bit less than that. But I see the same opportunity here. So we think we can double the business over the next 5 years. You've heard about the data center opportunities. Kevin talked about the new fundraising channels. We don't think we have to do anything completely outside of our skill set to do that. We don't need to become an insurance company. We think that scaling our existing strategies, launching adjacent strategies that capitalize on our core competencies, expanding the fundraising channels, and then on the margins to the extent there's some strategic JVs or potentially M&A as well. So going back to the financial model. If we're able to be at $60 billion to $70 billion of fee-earning equity, that comfortably generates $500 million to $600 million a year of revenue. As far as margins, on the first quarter earnings call, I think I mentioned that at Q1 2023, we were at an LTM margin of 21% by the end of 2023. We were at a margin of 31%. As we continue to scale, we should be able to bring those into the mid-40s. So when we step back and we think about the firm, we think about 3 areas of value. There's fee revenues, which I just talked about. There's our balance sheet capital and there's carry interest. We have a strong balance sheet, and we continue to delever over time. As of March 31st, we had $372 million of debt. We completed the exchange of our 2025 notes in Q2. So now we have $300 million of debt and interest rate below 4% in addition to our preferreds, which I'll talk about in a minute. On the asset side, we've got almost $1.4 billion invested alongside our investors in our funds, which we think is a really compelling asset, got over $100 million of cash and undrawn revolver. So carried interest. This is a really significant part of our business model. It's really important to our LPs. They find it to be a great alignment of interests. Our employees value it, but it's often ascribed limited value by the public markets. In fairness, we're probably in the early innings of carry generation at DigitalBridge, but we think it's a potential source of significant upside for the firm. And just to make sure that everyone understands how we think about it and why we think there's so much value there. I want to walk through a really simple kind of analysis. So in the DBP strategy, so this is just our DBP 1, 2 and 3 funds and co-investments of associated assets. We have $27 billion of capital. That includes sort of the projected fundraising on DBP III. So if we double that, which is generally what we target, that generates $27 billion of profit. The average carry rate on all this capital is 18% and the firm's share of that carry is 27%. So some of our older funds have a lower carry rate to the firm. Some of the newer funds have a higher percentage of the firm. But on average, the firm gets 27% of that. So that's $1.3 billion of value to the firm over time. Lastly, I'm going to talk a little bit about our capital allocation priorities. There's sort of 2 buckets to capital allocation. One of which is structural. In this industry, we invest typically 2% to 3% alongside our investors in the funds. So that's a requirement but it's also something we find very attractive. Historically, since 2020, we invested about $1 billion in the assets that we manage. Then we have discretionary capital opportunities. So historically, that's been capital structure of the balance sheet. Some of the stuff Marc talked about deleveraging. We also have the opportunity to pursue M&A opportunities. And then to a lesser extent, we've opportunistically done share repurchases and our -- we have a small dividend. Going forward, those 4 buckets really are still how we think about it, although investing along outside LPs, we think is really attractive. We can compound capital in the mid to high teens. And we just think that's a good use of our capital. Capital structure optimization. We've done a lot of the hard work. We still have the preferred outstanding. We don't find the interest rate on those to be particularly expensive. But from a gross quantum, we would like to bring that down over time. We also see a number of opportunities on the M&A front. For us to look at M&A, it's got to be accretive. It's got to have a strong return on investment, mid to high teens. And we also are going to look at whether -- I think Marc talked a little bit about buying versus building. We always look at that. Is it better to buy or is it better to build something. And lastly, the share repurchases and dividends. We're a growth company. We find a lot of compelling opportunities to deploy capital. So our share repurchases would be typically be more opportunistic than programmatic. So I probably went through that a little fast, but I try to keep it simple. Strong revenue growth, simple financial model and clear priorities on capital allocation. I also mentioned is a people business. And so my partner, Francisco Sorrentino, as our Chief People Officer, is going to talk now a little bit about our people and how we're going to manage this.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Francisco Sorrentino. I'm the Chief People Officer at DigitalBridge. Great to be here with you today. What I'd like to do is to share a little bit about the work we're doing behind the scenes to support all this growth and scale story. But before getting into that, I'd like to share a little bit about me as a way of intro, I joined DigitalBridge a year ago. I was working at SoftBank as a CHRO and also an operating partner, leading our human capital practice, practice that I created, supporting more than 400-plus portfolio companies. And before SoftBank, I was working at Microsoft, IBM, AIG and Merck. But I would say, more importantly, and where you work is when I think I had opportunity to work in all these firms at a very pivotal time of the organization when there was a lot of transforming, a lot of change, which I think relates to my story that I started a year ago with DigitalBridge. Obviously, it's a great firm, great momentum, and amazing team, many things that Tom mentioned are also my drivers for being in the firm. But I think the moment of the firm facing the incredible opportunity that we have ahead, building scale, growing the company and being part of the journey was incredibly appealing to me. So that's what I'm here. So let's talk a little bit about what is that we're doing to scale the firm behind the scenes because obviously, fundraising and investing, but how we prepare the planning of the organization to scale in an efficient and sustainable way. The first thing I want to talk about 3 areas of work today. They basically want to focus on organizational performance and scale, which is basically all the work that we need to do to prepare the organization to function in the best possible way, thinking about the people, the roles, the functionality of the firm, the processes, the technology that we need. And obviously, all the processes that align with driving a high-performance culture in the organization, which is the second bucket. The culture and employee experience are something that I think we have in relatively good shape in the firm. We have a great culture, high performance, I would say. We have an employee experience that has been evolving over the last 12 months. But as we think of scaling and gaining scale and growing and being in multiple places at the same time. The question is how you sustain the employee experience, how you sustain the culture, how you make it consistent, how you make it cohesive, how you maintain its power? So that's the second bucket of work that we're very focused on. And the third one is, well I think we're doing amazing work in the value creation space with the companies, but over the last year, we have built really strong capability on the HR side, building capabilities like talent acquisition, compensation, organizational design, talent management. So the question is how we can put these capabilities to the service of our due diligence in investment assessment and obviously the value creation piece working with the portfolio of companies in areas like [ helping for C-suite ] roles, helping them turn their organizations into more efficient machine and obviously, to resolve complex compensation issues, for example. So the -- when you think about scaling the organization, the first thing that you need to account for is fit-for-purpose. It's like what organization is trying to do. So starting for what are the plans for growth for the organization, where do we want to go in the next 10 years, what is that we're trying to build. So we're thinking about what is the right setup for us, thinking about areas like capital formation Kevin was mentioning that we're scaling up the team. The question is how we plan for what type of capabilities and what capacity we need to really be efficient in an area like capital formation, we brought in capabilities like technology that we didn't have. And the question is what type of process are we going to face in the next 10 years and design around that in order to be able to build efficiently and decisively. And when you think about organizational design, then you think about processes to the next step. So we're looking into every core process that we have in the organization in order to make sure that we understand how we can make them more efficient and more effective. And the idea is to introduce as much automation and technology as possible. And that's why we have Stephen Stryker that has joined and he's been hiring an incredible team in order to think about how we can trade all this manual work for automation and technology. Now in order to work around processes and bringing the right technology, we need to -- we need the people and the capabilities to do that. So over the last year, we've been acquiring this talent from the market with the idea of gaining a point of view on what good looks like, bringing in best practices, bringing in the people that is helping us understand how we need to build the plumbing of this organization to make it sustainable and scalable going forward. The idea is that this requires investment, and this investment comes in a way of, obviously, adding people to the team with idea to maybe reducing in the future the workforce required to do that. in the short term in order to acquire this talent in a highly competitive environment. What we need to do is to really think about our compensation practice, for example, is something that we went out there and made sure that our practices and compensation and overall rewards were competitive. So we had to invest a little bit there because we are actually competing for talent in a very competitive market. And certainly, right now, we're being very successful in the market. We don't have to overpay for talent. But certainly, we cannot underpay either. So the idea was to investing in compensation in selective areas, capital formation, investment management technology in order to be able to bring in this talent to organization that we need. Now the second thing that we need to do in addition to pay well is to make sure that we bring the right talent because there's a lot of amazing talent out there, not all of the talent is right for us. Because at the end of the day, we are not there with other firms that are more mature, more developed. We are a firm that we required a lot of work. We are actually evolving, scaling. We are building out the firm. So what we need to do is to bring the people in the organization that helped us with that construction process. And we need people that wants to see this as an opportunity to learn to grow, to develop. So the intersection between providing good compensation, good conditions and giving them a project that they're really believe in is very important because, again, we need help to build the firm for the next 10 years. Maybe in 5, 10 years, we're going to be a shop that is fully developed, very mature, and we are going to need a different type of talent. But right now, that's the talent we need. Now this is super important because the success rate we've had in the market in terms of hiring has been very high. The attrition levels are very low. So the people are landing very well in the organization, and that's basically help us gain traction and also save money and time by not having to do with a lot of attrition. Now in terms of when you think about scale and we think about the culture, we think about the governance, one of the things that we're looking into is, today, we can handle the organization because I think it's a manageable size. As you grow, you need to think about how you can be in all the places at the right time. So when you think about your employee experience, when you think about your culture, when you think about your governance, the execution -- the consistency and execution. Their relationship with LPs, the relationship with regulation, how you ensure that you are operating consistently across the board. Well, you can do that through your leaders, through your managers that those are your channels. So the idea is that we're investing in a very thorough process to train our leaders and managers in order to make sure that they become our channels, we can deliver on all these things consistently across the board without a very strong set of managers and leadership is very hard to scale. So that's going to be another focus area for us. So anyways, just to give you, again, the highlights. One, we're investing without investing in people, in technology, we can't really scale. And that's what we're doing, and we've been doing in the last 12 months, and we're going to continue doing so selectively in areas like technology, capital formation, investment management, but we have to invest. We need to set up -- continue setting up a very high standard for what is performance in the organization. So we've been working around replumbing all of our performance management approach to ensure that we have a consistent bar for what is performance, very consistent performance standards across the organization and to really set up a high performance environment, which is what people really joined the organization from reputable firms expect to find. And last but not least, we want to really leverage our capabilities to support the portfolio. We really believe that there's a new gear that we can find in our value-creation approach by leveraging people, HR capabilities in the support of due diligence and value creation work going forward. So with that, I will -- it was a bit fast, but I will turn it over to you, Marc.

So let's just frame the last 20 to 30 minutes, we'll spend together. I'm going to ask my partner, Ben Jenkins to come on up and Co-Chair fireside chat, which we entitle around the world. We're going to get you exposure to our 3 big markets outside of the U.S. and Canada and just share some thoughts about what we're seeing in Asia, in Europe and in Latin America. So Bernardo Vargas come on up, please, from who runs LatAm for us. Matt Evans, who runs Europe and Justin Chang, who runs Asia. We'll go through this panel. We've got a short video about other construction and other things we're doing around the world. I'll give some closing remarks, a little chance for Q&A and then we'll go to have some drinks where we can all interact together. So for me, this is a lot of fun because I get the opportunity to travel and spend time in these 3 regions with our 3 leaders in these geographies. And maybe just thinking for a second, Ben, around what's happening in the world? And you as the CIO, maybe you can frame the discussion a little bit.

Sure. Well, as you've heard today, we are a global firm, we're engaged in a global business, and it's critical that we're be able to deliver the firm wherever we are in the world. So that includes fundraising, as you've heard. It includes deal making. It includes construction and development.

And these 3 gentlemen to my left are on the front lines of that. And I think maybe, Justin, just since you're immediately to my left, you can talk about what you're seeing in Asia because that's probably the newest region and arguably today, the highest growth for us.

Thanks, Ben. Look, thank you for joining us today. Look, Asia Pacific for us is our newest market. It's also our fastest growing market. And I think what's really exciting about it is all of these trends that we talked about today are still on the come in Asia, right? So Asia Pacific, generally speaking, 3, 4, 5 years behind the U.S. and Europe in terms of digital infrastructure as an asset class, in terms of sale leasebacks, outsourcing, asset sales, things like that. Most of the digital infrastructure assets and businesses across towers, data centers, fiber, edge infrastructure is still owned by the legacy owners, right? So it's the legacy telecom carriers. It's the legacy tech conglomerates, the big Japanese and Korean trading houses, big family business groups. All that's going to change over the next 3, 4, 5 years, and we're beginning to see that. And so I think sale leasebacks, outsourcing, carve-outs, spinouts, all that is beginning to happen. And what these counterparties care about the most value matters and capital matters, but what they really want is a partner they can trust, right? Because they're looking at us to own and manage their mission-critical network infrastructure and they're looking for somebody that actually knows what they're doing. And so what's really attractive for Asia for us is we can take what we've done in the U.S. and Europe and bring it to Asia, right? So that pattern recognition that we've accomplished in other markets. When we port it to Asia and the conversations we have with these counterparties, it's a very different conversation, right, at least to proprietary transactions. Frankly, it's less competitive. The Asian macro backdrop is more benign, fundamentally higher GDP growth, more moderate inflation, interest rate rises have been more muted. Domestic financing very much available. So you have a combination of pretty benign macro, high growth and 3, 4, 5 years behind the U.S. and Europe. So we're pretty excited about the region for what we do. And I think the next 3, 4, 5 years, we'll really see some of that come to fruition.

Great. Thank you. And Bernardo, you and I get the pleasure of traveling to Latin America frequently. Tell us a little bit about what you're seeing and what you're excited about in that region.

Well, thank you, Ben, and I'm very excited to be here. And I think the segue to Justin's comment is very much in Latin America because we're way behind the developed nations in the world in terms of digital divide. I think that the digital penetration in Latin America is only in the 70s maybe, whereas in Europe, Western Europe or the U.S., it's over 90s. If you look at Internet penetration, it's a little bit higher, but still way behind other trends. So that is, I think, a very important for opportunities going forward. I don't come -- Ben and Marc when we -- when I came into the firm, I had never worked in North America. I've been -- I have 30 years of experience in the business, in the region. And [Foreign Language], so I know what goes on there, what the trends are happening. And I think that, as Justin pointed out, the opportunities that we have for growth on the digital space are huge. There's -- we've already been doing things there as we have been discussed by my previous partners, but there's still a lot to do.

Great. And Matt, this was before your time, but in one of our first meetings, Marc and I met with a consultant who was absolutely convinced that we could never be successful in Europe. It was too penetrated. We had nothing to offer. And today, that's obviously our largest market outside of the United States, and you and the team deserve great credit for that. But I think, as Justin and Bernardo have alluded to, our DigitalBridge model does translate across oceans and across borders. And maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

Yes. Look, I mean, I think our model translates incredibly well into Europe. And it's particularly the case because the European digital infrastructure sector tends to only lag the U.S. by about 2 years. I think one of the big differences, though, that we do see in Europe is that because it's a bit more country by country, we don't have that federalization that we have -- that you have here in the U.S. is it tends to create larger in-country opportunities. So where you might need to build in the data center space, 200 or 300 gigawatt campuses, we'll see multiple opportunities to build, say, 50- or 100-megawatt in country. And we've seen a lot of that come through in some of our Vantage platforms, for example, in the way that, that platform has been able to take up some of the [indiscernible] demand that we've seen spill over into markets like Berlin and Zurich as Europe has really followed this sort of path of availability zones coming to almost every market you can think of.

And to that point, Matt, maybe I could just drill a little bit further -- what are some of the things as we move into our third strategy on flagship? What does your team really like right now across buying and building as you think about the next 3 to 4 years of investing in Europe?

Great question, Marc. So if I look at sort of everything that we do around the globe and particularly look at the ecosystem across this, where we are in Europe is it's really that hybrid cloud space, which is on the precipice of huge demand coming. I don't think we're going to see a great deal of AI training in Europe. And if we are, it's probably Finland and Norway. But the opportunity to find the right platform, and this is very much a build opportunity, right? This is very much a how do we find the right management team and put the capital behind them to create the equivalent to Switch in Europe because we know those workloads are going to be demanded and particularly demanded on the public sector side, I suspect in European markets, perhaps in some contrast to the U.S. And we've seen a little bit of that in our Vantage platform we already like a lot of the workloads that we run out of Cardiff, right, of that sort of nature.

U.K. government, yes. Interesting. And on the buy side, where do you think we are in the cycle in Europe in terms of buying platforms? Any sectors you prefer over others.

Look I think, this still -- Yes. I mean there's definitely still a big gap between sort of buyer and seller expectations. But I think fiber-to-the-home presents a big opportunity. Europe is only about 60% penetrated at this point. We've obviously had a very good experience in the U.K. with our Netomnia platform and looking to translate some of those learnings into other markets, particularly across Southern Europe or Benelux. I think France is basically done. Germany is incredibly hard, and a lot of people have lost money in that market. But we're tracking a good dozen opportunities across fiber-to-the-home in Europe today, specifically for DBP III.

Bernardo bring that to LatAm for a second in terms of -- you talked about lower penetration, the lower 70s. Matt's talking about penetration in 60s. In this strategy, where do you get excited? 1 or 2 investments probably in this strategy in your region where would you go buy versus build? Do you like the fiber space? Do you like towers? Where do you see the progression?

Yes. A lot of the conversations that we have seen about data sovereignty about the needs for new players to be present there in a region that's going to have a lot of growth, is interesting for all our platforms. I think that if you talk to people that are on the -- in the towers business and you see the penetration needs there, you are excited about that. So there's still opportunities to be [ exploited ] there. If you talk about fiber, there's a lot of the numbers that Matt just mentioned, even lower there. So -- and the importance of having fiber not only attached to towers, but the data centers, and of course, data center growth still has a lot to grow. There's a region with higher urbanization percentages, high education levels amongst the emerging markets. So that's also very right for investors to look at that region. So altogether, I think that's very interesting. And going back to the initial -- to the start of this conversation today, talk about new logos coming in to invest. I think that the 100 to 1,000 number that Kevin pointed out to this afternoon, is exactly other opportunities to be attacked in Latin America.

You guys just off the road yes, you guys were just fundraising.....

We just converted our first local account, and it came through a co-investment into our Mundo Pacifico platform. And that shows, again, the power of our model where we can access new investors through direct investments, and now we're talking to them about a potential fund commitment.

Absolutely. They love that our business is countercyclical. They love that our business is specialized, which is a change from a year ago, and they love the fact that we're global as well. And they're -- that we -- what we learn in other regions, we bring to that region.

And Justin, same thing fit into your neck of the woods. Just a little bit on fundraising because I just got done fundraising with you in Asia. What's been the sea change there? What do you see is happening in LP's minds? Why us? Why now? And why are we excited about Asia from a fundraising perspective?

Look, I think the Asian institutional LP base is a huge opportunity and has the potential over time to be maybe our largest region. The Asian institutional capital tends to be followers. So they're not investors in first time or even second-time funds. And a lot of the capital -- there's a ton of capital in Japan, Korea, Australia, just to name 3 markets, massive -- trillions of dollars of private capital, and they tend to be followers. But when they make a decision and move, they move aggressively. They move at scale and they're very loyal and sticky customers/investors. So we're just starting to penetrate that, right? So first fund, second fund with this third fund, we're getting a lot of interest among the Japanese investor base, the Korean investor base and the Aussie super funds. So that's a big opportunity for us. The second thing that makes us more attractive to them is now we're in the region, right? They're investing in us because we're a global investor. They also like the fact that we're active in their local markets. So now that we have a big business in Asia Pac, we've got people on the ground and all the markets I mentioned, that local connectivity makes a big difference. The investment side and the capital formation side kind of goes hand-in-hand. And I think, again, for the capital formation side, Asia has the potential to become a much bigger part of what we do. And I think that's all in front of us, Marc.

And just sort of batting cleanup, what do you like right now in your region, buy, build, what sectors are interesting to you?

Look, there's still a lot to do in towers, both buy and build. So we're looking at a couple of towers opportunities in the region, buy and build, data centers, too, both on the hyperscale side and edge data centers. So I would say, yes and yes, buy and build, towers, hyperscale, edge, that's kind of where we're focused.

And Matt touched on data sovereignty in Europe, and so did Bernardo. Where are you in your region in terms of data sovereignty and where are those discussions with the big government agencies?

It's a big issue and a big opportunity, right? The more balkanize the markets, the more opportunity there is for us. And Europe is a great example and there's some of that in Asia Pacific, too, right? The big hyperscale companies can play across markets. But as you get into AI, you get into inference, you get into really sensitive data and eventually private cloud. Australia is going to want its data in a business in Australia. Japan is going to want its data in a business in Japan, right? So you need to have the right local partners, the right platforms, the right management teams in each of these markets. And these are big markets, Australia, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia led by Singapore. These are very significant scale markets. So over time, having different data center platforms in many of these markets creates a ton of opportunity for us.

Let me just point out, I'm sorry. Two things that I did mention that, that [ pitching ] to what Justin is saying. One is the fact that energy is such an important part of this business. And we've spoken about that all day. The energy sources in Latin America are very clean, very green, mostly hydro, but a lot of opportunity there as well. And then the other trend that picks up the those trends that Justin mentioned in Asia is near shoring. Latin America potentially would be the best region in the world for near-shoring to North American firms.

Bernardo, you're very humble, you ran the largest public traded utility company in the region before coming to DigitalBridge. In terms of power sourcing for renewable energy, why were we successful in Scala in terms of sourcing that power? And why is that important to other businesses that we build on the region?

That's a perfect question because it just picks up where we will be discussing all day. So the Scala growth was based on the right site. We picked up the right site that had energy, had real estate opportunities to grow and that was perfect. And of course, the Brazil grid is 60% hydro. So the fact is that the power coming in Scala was clean. So it was -- the planets aligned and I think that, that model is something that, as we described earlier today is going to be applied globally if we can. But of course, we need to find new opportunities to do it in a creative way. So -- to avoid grid sometimes to be able to be closer to the source and to be able to ourselves developed solutions for that, that will make us greener without having to depend as in Latin America with the fact that the origin of the energy, the source is green.

Well, I want to thank all of you for this quick tour around the world. A quick applause for my partners here. And with I think we have a small video, Severin.

Yes, we're going to do a tour of the world, actually looking at some of the construction that we're doing literally today [indiscernible] our portfolio companies.

Good afternoon. I'm Raul Martynek. I'm the CEO of DataBank. DataBank is one of the largest operators of data centers in the U.S. And today, we are at our ETL4 facility here in Atlanta and delighted to show you our new development. DataBank has been in the Atlanta market since 2018. It's been a great journey. When we acquired the business in 2016, it was 6 data centers in 3 markets. And today, we're 70 data centers in 25 markets. The way I think about DataBank is I really think we're building the Internet infrastructure of the future. If you think about the Internet and the evolution of the Internet over the last 25 years, it's physically changed, like the Internet looked very different in '95 than they did in 2000 than they did in 2005 than it did in 2010. We believe the next 10 years is around a centralization aspect to be driven by these ultra-low latency applications. And DataBank, we think, is extremely well positioned to take advantage of that trend. I think it's going to be a very bright future for DataBank and for the DigitalBridge.

I'm Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, the CEO of GD Towers, one of Europe's largest leading tower company, which is operating since 2023. We are operating in Austria and in Germany and already now, with these 200, one of the leading tower cos in Europe. So today, we are here in a very rural area, very close to [indiscernible], just half Norway. If you look into the growth story into Germany, you look into maybe 3 areas: one is closing white spots. What is a white spot? Even Germany as being the most important economy in Europe has still a lot of areas where no coverage at all that's the reason we call it white spots. Building more than 1,000 additional sites in Austria and in their Germany together. This gives us a huge income in the future because this is something with more than 11,000 ground-based towers only in Germany where you have a lot of space, a lot of possibilities, next door rooftop we have to give them the chance to use our towers, and this is a great business ahead of us. It's nice now with DigitalBridge being a part of this community and looking for growth and working together with a good team from DigitalBridge to make that happen.

My name is Chiew, and I'm the CEO of AIMS. AIMS today is one of the leading data center in Malaysia. What we've seen today here, it is our second CBD site. CBD Meaning the central business district. It is a dense ecosystem data center that equip and dense with a lot of connectivity. And this is something that we have been designing and developing for an AI use. Our customers that have just turned on a couple of weeks ago, is an AI customer and we were told that this is the first installation or a deployment of an AI in Malaysia. We believe the AI wave is coming. And with the partnership that we have with DigitalBridge, that comes not only in terms of financial power, but what more importantly is the global experience in terms of the market, in terms of the industry, DigitalBridge has very similar DNA as us, being a company that is a [indiscernible] flexible and yet is all about pushing performance.

Hello, I'm Mike Finley, CEO of Boingo Wireless. I'm standing here in this middle of Grand Central, one of the great iconic train stations, not only in our country, but in the world. It's a great place to describe what we do at Boingo. We build complex, converged, neutral connectivity networks and big venues, 18 stories below the ground. We've just completed a build of 2 new tunnels, a Long Island Railroad and Central Madison, a new set of train tracks under the East River now customers can enjoy connectivity, WiFi, cellular licensed hybrid, and we're bringing it all together with 1 network, everything that's going with AI, all the needs, all the purposes, all the speed, the reliability, the security that we're going to need starts with a great network. That's what we build. We build a great network in all of our venues so that those types of applications are going to be reliable and be usable. It's been fantastic being a part of the DigitalBridge family. What's great about DigitalBridge is the amount of expertise and support that we get. Yes, access to capital and the financial backing and guidance and support that we get is fantastic. But more important is the family that Marc and Ben and the senior team have created and certainly expertise that we have on our Board is really focuses in on our company and our future and what we're trying to build has been unbelievably beneficial to us since we've been a part of the family.

So that was a quick trip around the world. As you can see, we've got shovels in the ground in a lot of different places. And I'm going to do something of an [indiscernible], Severin, you didn't know I was going to do this. But in my closing statements, I'd like all of our partners come up here on stage with me. So Dean, Steve Stryker, Yes, the lawyers in the background. Blake, Goldy, come on up here. If you're with DigitalBridge come out of the stage here, just stand up here with us. And I'm just going to say a couple of comments before we finish here. Alex, yes you too, you're part of the team, adviser, where is Alex Gellman? Staff out there somewhere. Chris Moon. Fill in the space, the -- or the -- as Bruno said, the white spaces. Look, I think, hopefully, the most important thing you got out of today is our team. As I said -- Leslie come on up here. And -- Peter Hopper come on up here. There's more of you up there, John Mockett come up here. Yes, yes, you're part of the team. I know I called a [indiscernible] because that's what I do. Look, the first thing I want to say is thank you to all of our partners. You're the ones that make it happen on a day-to-day basis. A lot is said about DigitalBridge and the -- 11 years ago, this journey began with Ben and myself and Tom Yanagi. He's one of the original guys here early and Alex -- And Alex Gellman, where is Alex? Alex get up here, too. Yes, we need Alex up here. This is a really important guy, by the way, because as I said, he's tolerated me for 30 years. I will tell my wife, if you wish. But it's so important that you have great people driving these businesses. That's really the difference of what we've been able to accomplish is the fact that we build a company and we build great customer relationships. And it really sets the table for where we're going in the future. And I love this quote from Jeff because it's pretty interesting. And he says, what people don't ask them and says, what's not going to change. Well, I'll tell you what's not going to change, for sure, is that people will need connectivity and people will need ultimately the ability to access the cloud, Internet, AI, and that's not going to change. You'll leave this room knowing that none of that is going to change. And why do we think that's important? It's important because we're building some of the most important businesses, and we're supporting some of the most important logos in the world. And the demand numbers that you see here are candidly irrelevant. because if we don't have the right people and we don't serve our customers, we don't exist. And that's really -- it started for me 30 years ago with Alex doing that, which was ultimately the promise of working for customers and showing up for them. And that's really what we've been able to do. And so at the end of the day, what gives us that opportunity is the fact that we do understand what we're doing. We understand this business at an intrinsic level that few really understand. It's beyond the operational expertise, the sector focus, building great platforms and ultimately, showing up for the customers. If you do that right, guess what happens? Bookings happen, new builds happen. And it's not accidental that you end up with a pipeline of over 7 gigawatts of opportunity, which went up 2 gigawatts in like 30 days. But we have a great opportunity. If you haven't gotten that from today, we've spelled it out for you in a very fundamental way that first, we're forming capital, and we're forming capital in a way that we've never formed capital in the 11 years of this company. We've scaled our team. We've deepened our access to clients, we're forming a private well channel, got over $14 billion of capital talking to us right now to fill out our budget for this year and beyond and getting into a normal cadence and most importantly, an institutional cadence around forming that capital. And why does that matter? It matters because we have a unique opportunity to deploy that capital to invest it. And that's a real privilege. The ability to invest that capital is exactly that -- Stephen, you're a little late, but you can get on up here, come out of on stage with us. And so -- and we walked you through how we're going to invest the capital and the thought at which it goes through. Tom laid out for you a simple algorithm. We believe we'll double the size of this company within 5 years. I expect to beat that. The reason I expect to beat that is because I have a strong conviction around our LPs. I have strong conviction around our portfolio companies. I have even stronger conviction around our product heads, the people that drive the investment strategies at this firm. They're building great businesses. And each of our strategies are actually businesses, and I hold them to that task of building a business. And that's really important. And they understand that. They understand that if you're running credit, you're building a business. If you're running late-stage venture growth, you're building a business. And that's where we're going. We're building great businesses inside of Digital Bridge. This multi-strat idea is not a new idea. But what we are presenting to you as a GP is we are a new GP. We're a GP built for the future, focused on the future and developing some of the most important and relevant infrastructure in the world. And at the end of the day, if we do that correctly, we fund raise, we invest, we continue to scale you as our investors will profit from that, and you'll be rewarded. We spend a lot of time with us today. I'm deeply appreciative for all the hard work that went into this. Thank you for staying here for over 3 hours to hear our story. The first 10 years that got us here Ben will not be the same 10 years that got us forward, come on forward. And Alex, -- but it did start with these 3 guys, you can come forward Alex. We decided to take a chance to go build a different investment platform. And that journey has taken us through this decade and I'll take us through the next decade. We're really privileged to represent your capital. We're really privileged to represent our LP capital. And again, I want to thank you for coming out today. I know we have a little bit of Q&A Severin, but I wanted to bring the partners up on stage. Thanks to all of them. Please give it up to them. Thank you, everybody.

Just do live Q&A, yes, yes. All right. So Severin went out and polled all of you on questions. And if we don't answer your question now, we'll be delighted to buy you a -- an adult beverage of your choice and answer your question or not an adult beverage of your choice, depending on you look at Tom come on up. Go ahead.

Sure. So 1 of the first questions is around our growth targets. We obviously lay those out today. I would say, Marc, for you when you think about 2x in 5 years, that kind of matches the data center growth that we mapped out, right, that 50 gigawatts on a global basis going to 100, how do you think about kind of meeting that demand that -- from customers?

Well, look, I think we've laid out, we're in the process of lighting up 2.4 gigawatts right now. That's going to cost us $25 billion to $26 billion. And then we have another pipeline by another 7 gigawatts by that, which could cost us $70 billion to $80 billion. So we're just literally sitting on close to $90 billion to $100 billion of investment in the next 3 to 5 years just in data centers alone, powering the AI economy. So that's going to require -- if that's $100 billion of quantum and you assume a 50% loan to value, we're going to have to go for $50 billion of equity just to go do that. And Tom Yanagi is going to be really busy because he's got to figure out how to raise the $50 billion of debt. What's interesting is that's just data centers, right? That's just 1 swim lane. If you look across the other things that we're doing in mobile infrastructure, densification of networks, fiber connectivity and some of the adjacencies that we see like in sub oceanic cables, low earth orbiting satellite infrastructure, digital media infrastructure, some of the adjacencies that we've been successful at, you can begin to see that there is an opportunity to deploy not only $100 billion of AUM, but I would offer to you if we continue to think about how to provide that power, which could be $0.50 on the dollar to every megawatt, there's probably another $50 billion plus of opportunity to develop renewable power sources adjacent to our data centers. And that's candidly why we entered InfraBridge was we wanted to get into the renewable space and infrastructure space. That's why we brought Alex over, brought Christian over. So putting the pieces of the puzzle, and I'm not trying to front run where we're going, but trying to bring excellent people in to develop new strategies, having that platform in existing infrastructure, having new product sets. Look, I believe we can obviously get from $80 billion of AUM to $160 billion, I want to challenge our team to get to $200 billion and beyond. And -- but we have the building blocks there. You can see where we're going. It's really easy to map. And the real challenge for us is just making sure that we do a responsible job with our existing capital, continue to create good returns, return the DPI, as Kevin mentioned earlier, and then go out and chase that next -- that 25 to 100 and that 100 to 1,000 and then the private wealth channels. I'm really excited about what we're doing in fundraising. A lot of investors, public investors don't see what we're doing because, as Kevin laid out for you, fundraising cycles are long, right? They're 18 months. And so this is kind of the first fundraising cycle where we've had an institutional team to go attack the marketplace. We never had that before. it was, as Kevin said, it was the two of us, it was Ben, it was every partner in the firm out fundraising. That institutionalization of fundraising is really important for us because now we're going to be on a cadence where we can raise $8 billion, $9 billion, $10 billion a year to support that AUM growth that we're talking about, that $50 billion of equity. And to the extent if we end up getting in the renewable space, we continue to grow our infrastructure space, we grow credit under Dean and Mike, I mean, you can begin to see a road map that even could look bigger. So I like our guidance. I think it's candidly conservative. I think we've put the fundamental building blocks in place that investors got to see today, first hand, and then you got to see the math behind it. You got to see the pipeline of fundraising. You got to see the pipeline of new construction. You see the depth of the new products and the team. We've laid it all out there for you. These are the building blocks and how you double. But you know me pretty well. If I put up a double, I obviously want to do more than that and we got a great CFO, and I got a great partner and Tom to help.

Yes. One of the questions we got for you, Tom, is around scaling, right? You've been part of organizations that have grown quickly and gotten to the kind of the scale that we're looking to achieve over time? What are some of the things that you feel like our kind of critical success factors. What do you want to do to help us execute that growth?

Yes. It sort of depends on what part of scaling. Just growing the existing business that's relatively simple if we perform and we invest well. We have to do other things as well. We have to be transparent with our investors. We have to deliver what they need. But ultimately, performance is the most important thing that matters in the existing businesses. And if we do that, those funds will grow. In terms of adjacencies, you have to really have conviction and you have to be honest with yourself as to what you're good at and not just chase something for vanity reasons. And so why would -- if we were going to go into something that's adjacent, why would we be good at it? Is it because the customers are the same as customers in some of our other funds? Is it because the revenue model of those assets is similar to existing businesses that we're familiar with. Do we have the right people? Do we have the right talent -- and are we -- do we have someone in the firm who's going to own it and he's going to wake up every morning thinking, hey, I'm going to make x successful. So it's about really making sure you have conviction about what you do and that you're going to be really good at it. I think I think Dean talked about on the credit side, the challenges that sort of generalist managers have because they're undifferentiated. And I think you don't want to fall into that bucket of just chasing a new trend that you're not really good at. And so I think that's the key is to be honest with yourself. And I think we have that in terms of the kind of the interplay among the management team where we challenge each other's ideas as to where we're really good and where we can do something that investors want, not just do something because a bunch of other people have done it and we want to follow along.

Yes. Interesting. One of the questions that we get, there's a lot of focus on data centers today. Obviously, AI, we talked a lot about that. but people want to understand kind of the relevance to the -- of the entire network. Maybe, Marc, you can talk a little bit about -- and you've touched on this in a couple of spots, the other swim lanes in digital?

Yes. I think there's 3 areas that I look at in adjacencies to AI, Severin. On the connectivity side, what we're noticing is particularly for these AI workloads, much larger strand count, redundant passive fiber. So if an old data center had 2 passive fiber and AI data center, maybe we'll have 4 or 6 different diverse paths. Strand count is much higher, more dark fiber, we're beginning to see that in some of our businesses in terms of the connectivity piece, we're beginning to see a rise in bookings from the hyperscalers as they ultimately build out to those bigger data centers in those language models as we move to inference. But I really see this hitting home in kind of the next phase of data center development in AI, which will be ultimately those hyper edge locations for AI that Raul was talking about. And that will be really important for us because it will create more metro connectivity because a lot of that connectivity will be in metro. You saw that with AIMS like a big AI workload right in the downtown CBD area. Well, to make that work, you need fiber. Diverse paths, interconnection, and there's going to be a lot of revenue opportunities in the fiber space. And then in addition to that, for AI workloads to really work, you've got to have great suboceanic connectivity. A lot of the early cables that were late in the late '90s and early 2000s, they are now reaching that age of 20, 25 years old when there begins to be functional obsolescence. And as you know, glass dissipates under water over time. So there's going to be a massive amount of new building in suboceanic fiber that's not going to be 4 pairs or 6 pairs. Christian, you're shaking right because you know exactly what I'm talking about. We're talking about 12 pairs, 16 pairs, 22 pairs. These are suboceanic routes that people haven't seen yet. There's going to be a whole wave of investment and transcontinental connectivity, that's really exciting. And then the last thing I would say is just that slide we put up around densification. Again, this isn't a guess. This is a highly educated guess because I got the privilege of building -- densifying 3G networks with Alex. We were there in the 4G densification phase and now we're seeing 5G densification. And we're having those conversations with customers that inform us about where we're going. And those conversations are getting very detailed. And what's clear is you're going to need more capacity and you're going to need more connectivity at the cell site level, which will ultimately translate. You're going to need that, as you just heard from Mike Finley, he's doing it 18 stories below New York City. And so this is really exciting, right, because there's a whole phase of 5G connectivity that isn't so much about 5G itself, but it's really about the applications. The next phase of mobility is all about applications. And that starts in our data center. It transmits through our fiber pass at companies like Everstream and Zayo and then it goes out to the macros and it goes to the small cells and it goes to edge computing. So as you've always said, data gravity, right? Data starts and then it ultimately falls naturally to where it goes. None of that model works unless you have all the pieces of the ecosystem. And that's what we've been building for 11 years and it's now manifesting itself. That's really exciting. The ability for, as Mike Finley said, his ability to talk to other portfolio companies, whether he's talking to Zayo or Everstream for fiber or whether it's a tower business, and we've got to go jointly bid on a state project like we did with Zayo, where we won the fiber piece, and we won the tower piece. These conversations are happening more and more at DigitalBridge, where we got to show up, not with just 1 portfolio company, we're showing up with a customer with multiple portfolio companies to solve the problem. And that was always the vision when Ben and I started the business was that could we create an investment platform that could go chase convergence, and it's starting to manifest itself in AI, which is really exciting.

Yes. Maybe stepping to the fundraising environment, that's something where there's a lot of attention right now. Where are LPs kind of in their journey around understanding AI and how and when does that kind of translate into capital formation? You see AI taking off, the demand is taking off, when does the fundraising and how does that work?

Well, I think the first thing that we say out on the fundraising trials, we just tell them like calm down. Like if it's too good to be true, it's not good to be true. And this is, again, taking the applied lessons of cloud where there's a lot of failures in early days of cloud. And so we tell investors, look, don't get overexcited, don't jump in the AI pool too fast. There's a safe place to go in AI which is infrastructure. That's a good place to start because that's the beginning of where it all starts. And then at the same set I'm just making sure that when our investors are doing stuff that's a bit [indiscernible], they call us when we get a chance to talk to them and explain to them, do we think that's a good idea or a bad idea. I think we get to see a little bit of that in our late-stage venture growth products. So that's with Alex, and you've been a part of that team a little bit, too. It's exciting because we get to test the technology. We dipped our toe on the water, of course, with our partnership with Intel and investing in Articul8, which is a great combination of us and Intel chasing generative AI in a space that's underserved. So I urge a lot of caution to investors around AI and then, of course, we're trying to create good co-investments for them. I think the recapitalization advantage with Silver, like Kevin mentioned earlier, that was a great partnership between us and Silver Lake. When we went out to go raise the co-invest capital, billions of dollars of capital showed up. Why? It's a good idea. There's nothing beats a good idea. So when we're out raising co-invest capital, if we have a great management team with a great idea and is a great backlog, you win. And Vantage showed us that, that was a very fast co-investment syndication raising billions of dollars in effectively 30 days, we were oversubscribed. Again, what works? What works is good ideas in AI, long-term contracts, a great management team and a great pipeline. When we bring those ideas to market -- and we have those co-investment ideas and opportunities. Severin, that's what's working. That's what LPs want in AI. They want exposure to stuff right now that's safe, reliable and has strong counterparty credit risk.

Yes. One of the things that we get questions about and have today is we see other alternative asset managers talking about digitization as being something that's more important to them. How does specialization matters manifest itself when you're talking to LPs? I mean how do you kind of highlight that differentiation?

I first start out with a simple concept, which is who's performed for you? And that's really easy. We've had 7 exits in the last 18 to 20 months. We've created over $8 billion of DPI for our investors. We've had the most exits in digital infrastructure of any GP in the world, and it's not even remotely close. So investors are funny, they're like consumers, they vote with their wallet. And ultimately, if we're returning capital, it gives us a great conversation piece for them to bring capital back to us. So the success we're having in this quarter, the success we're going to have the rest of this year is a function of the fact that we've been responsible with the capital, we've returned the capital and the generalist peer set have returned very little DPI in digital infrastructure. We've been returning DPI. And that's not in the front to our competitors and our peers. It's just we've been doing this a really, really long time. They've been doing it for a very little time. And so because we've been at it a long time, it's given us the chance to return capital. They're relatively the new guys on the block, and so it's going to take them time to put up the wins and return the capital. So we hear the generalist GPs on their public calls talking big numbers around data centers and AI and how they all want to be in digital infrastructure. That's great. It's validation of what we're doing. We're the guys that have been in 30 years. And so when push comes to [indiscernible] allocators want to put money into digital infrastructure. And it's more pronounced, Severin, in co-investments. When we have a co-investment that goes out, the reason we were able to form $10 billion in co-investment last year was not only because Kevin worked really hard, but we had really good platforms. We have really good ideas and investors will gravitate to co-investments where their strong management teams and a great track record. So some of our peers in the generalist space have hung syndications. We don't have any hung syndications. That's really important because if you have a hung syndication, then your portfolio company doesn't have the equity and the capital to keep growing. We've been able to always support -- you've heard from our CEOs today, DigitalBridge not only shows up with the money, we show up with the ideas, and we show up with the execution. The money is important, but the execution is what matters. And the fact that we've been entrusted with capital and we've returned it, that to me is exactly what our job is. We have no confusion in our shop about what we do. When investors give us their money, it's seminal that we return it, and we return it with a good return.

Terrific. Why don't we end on that. I think we can do some more Q&A. We've run a little bit over time, but we're going to have cocktails in the next room here, and we'll look forward all of our senior management team will connect with you in person here. So I want to end by thanking Marc and Tom and the rest of the DigitalBridge team for joining us today.