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

[Audio Gap] For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. The taking of photographs and use of recording devices is also not allowed. If you have any questions, please reach out to Morgan Stanley sales representative. Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us for our last fireside chat of the Morgan Stanley Financials Conference. I'm Stephanie Ma, member of the Brokers, Asset Managers and Exchanges team for Morgan Stanley Research. For our final session of the day, it's my pleasure to welcome Marc Ganzi, CEO of DigitalBridge. DigitalBridge is a leading global alternative asset manager specializing in digital infrastructure investing with $100 billion of assets under management. Thanks for joining us today, Marc.

Yes. Thanks, Stephanie. Good to be here.

Great. So maybe let's kick off with some background of the business for those of us around the room that are less familiar with DigitalBridge. We understand at your legacy, you were a REIT with balance sheet investments. So what led to the decision to deconsolidate, simplify the business model? And where do you stand today in that evolution?

Well, first of all, we do trace our roots back as an operator. So I think a lot of people have different paths and how they end up in the alternative asset management space. Our journey was really about a continuation in an arc, which was started for me 32 years ago, which was building mission-critical infrastructure for customers. And so what's happened in the last three decades in infrastructure, particularly in digital assets is as technology has evolved, the capital required to build this infrastructure has also evolved. And I'll just say it's not only evolved, it's gotten significantly bigger. And the need for ubiquitous everywhere coverage around the world today is a big business, whether it's mobile networks, fiber networks, data infrastructure. And I think when I started 30 years ago, I don't think anyone thought building cell towers was mission-critical infrastructure. I think people looked at a cell phone and they said that was a luxury item, right? And now today, cell phones are -- mobile devices are a big part of our -- the fabric of what we do. And so we started as a REIT, as you said, because it was easy for us to deploy capital in a REIT format. It was very efficient, and it was a good tax structure. But something happened about 10 years ago, which was the advent of the public cloud. And when we started building our first big data centers and those data centers went from being $50 million projects to $200 million projects to $800 million projects, the quantum of capital shifted really fast into high gear. And what we found is that to continue to grow our portfolio of companies, we were going to have to go out and get third-party capital because we couldn't keep up with the cadence at which it was moving. And so we did that. We did it in a series of continuation vehicles from 2013 to 2019. We successfully raised about $4 billion of third-party capital. We took an audacious sort of assumption that people would pay us to manage that capital. So we took a small fee and a large promote. And before you knew it, we were sitting on $14 billion of assets, third-party assets. And we were growing faster than American Tower and Digital Realty and Equinix, much faster. Why were we growing faster? Because we could take that capital, we could deploy it at speed and at scale. And then in 2019, we launched our first commingled fund. And then in 2020, we merged with Colony Capital, which was an alternative asset manager in the real estate space. And then shortly thereafter, I became the CEO and the Board gave me the mantle of dismantling our commercial real estate and going full into digital. And so we did that. At that point in time, we were less than $20 billion of assets. This is going back 4.5 years ago. And as you said correctly, today, we're $100 billion in assets under management. And the balance sheet is very much simplified. Got rid of $19 billion of debt. We sold off $50 billion of real estate. Today, we have about $300 million of debt, which is our securitized debt against our fee streams and our funds. And the story has gotten easier, and our balance sheet got lighter. We deconsolidated our two big balance sheet investments, which was Vantage, which builds huge hyperscale campuses to the leading tech companies in the world. And then DataBank, which is a really significant edge computing business where we build edge data centers to support growth at the edge of networks. And both those assets have performed incredibly well. And so instead of putting balance sheet capital back to work into hard assets, we made the decision to start putting balance sheet capital into fund products. And that's really been the shift in the balance sheet. So as we lighten the balance sheet, we grew our GP stakes business. And at the same time, we figured out that if we were going to go asset-light and we were going to be eventually an alternative asset manager, which is a decision we took in first quarter last year, we also understood that we had created this really unique flywheel which is a 320-person team globally, always looking in and around the digital infrastructure ecosystem. And what was happening in that flywheel is we were letting opportunity escape 2, 3 years ago. And when I say opportunity was escaping, we were allowing certain assets that were core moving off to people that did core investments. Our really good assets, we didn't know how to do continuation funds. We saw middle market digital infrastructure firms which we couldn't put equity to work we were doing loans. And eventually, we've gotten on to this notion around power and real estate, which I'll get to in a second. But what was clear to us is there was this incredible flywheel of knowledge. We sit at the fulcrum of it, which is dead in the center, which is we get to see companies early -- and so there was an opportunity to deploy capital in other ways. So we stood up a credit team. We stood up a late-stage venture growth team. We stood up a liquid securities group. And recently, we've stood up a group to go do power and to do stabilized data centers in a real estate format. So we made this decision and the jump last year to become a multi-strat firm. And I think that was our proclamation that we're here to stay. We're going to stay in the alternative asset management space, and we're going to grow our product sets. We're going to stand up new teams, stand up new products. And we believe that we can continue to grow organically through raising capital, deploying capital -- but coming back to one core tenet, which is that we work for customers. And we have this unique privilege that we work for the biggest customers in the world, as you say, the Magnificent 7, but we also work for Verizon and AT&T and Deutsche Telekom and Orange and Vodafone. And these are big long-lived multi-decade relationships. My bet, my secular bet, we all have to make a bet, whether it's -- whether you're Michael Arougheti, Jonathan Gray, Bruce Flatt or Marc Ganzi, you're making a bet. And our bet is that ultimately, digital infrastructure will be a tailwind that will persist for decades to come. And whether it's cloud, whether it's AI, whether it's 5G, whether it's fiber connectivity, whatever it is, digital is no longer a luxury item. It's a necessity. And it's a critical necessity in terms of how the global economy works and functions, and it's becoming more prevalent. And at the same time, the aperture is widening. And as the aperture widens, there's more CapEx going into the ground and there's more capital needed and there's more capital solutions needed to the digital economy. We want to be the biggest and most important and trusted provider of that capital to the digital economy. And that's where we've made our claim. And just based on the size that we are, we may be small as an all, but in the digital world, we're the biggest at what we do.

A lot of alternative asset manager investors and analysts like myself, we like to characterize the firms as balance sheet light or balance sheet heavy. I don't know if this is a tough question, but where does DigitalBridge fall in that segment?

I'd say we're at the tail end of a transition. I think we were balance sheet heavy. Now we're moving more towards balance sheet light. I would say today, we're balance sheet, what I'd call neutral, which is somewhere in between. Maybe it's balance sheet Goldilocks, depending on how you look at it. But I think we have a good balance sheet. I think the key is -- for me, it's not so much as a -- this is my fourth time as a CEO. I look at the balance sheet and I say, I don't really care if it's big or small. I really focus on what are my debt service obligations and whether or not we can continue to use the balance sheet correctly. And so we've always made the case to public investors, whether we were a REIT or whether we're an alternative asset manager, we said we're going to be very judicious about how we allocate capital. The highest priority of allocating capital should be to maximize shareholder value, period, irrespective of your format. And so for us, it's how can we continue to scale and how can we continue to leg into verticals where we have a very articulated competitive advantage. When I say an articulated competitive advantage, again, I have to use Bruce and Jon and Arougheti and Rowan as the guys that I have to go compete. My battlefield changed. I was competing against American Tower, Crown and Equinix and DLR. And today, I have to compete against guys that are managing trillions of dollars of capital. So I have to have a differentiation. I have to have an edge. And our edge is that at the core, we know how to deploy capital because we're deploying that capital in what I call success-based situations, which is there's always a customer tethered to what we're doing. So whether we're originating a loan in our credit business, whether we're making a late-stage venture growth investment, whether we're in flagship or whatever we're doing, power, real estate, we're making those decisions because we know the counterparty credit risk. at the end of the day, when you invest, and again, it really doesn't matter who you are, there has to be a core set of guiding principles on how you deploy capital on behalf of institutions. And this is where I think we really stand out and excel because of the fact that we -- our origins were that of an industrialist where we built the infrastructure. And we spent the first 20 years of our careers building and owning it and working for customers, we have this very fundamental nature of how we underwrite, which is to the basics. Do you own the land? Do you have the great customer relationship? Is the long-term contracted obligation? Do you have escalation provisions? And can you grow the asset. And I think that -- from that comes a whole series of opportunities. If you can really distill that investment, whether it's credit or whether it's equity, we actually underwrite credit and equity the same because fundamentally, the look-through always has to be about the asset. It has to be about the customer. Again, back to what are we today. We're an alternative asset manager. So the look through in whatever strategy that I'm standing up, and we can get into the strategies in a second. I have this core belief about what we do and how we deploy capital that actually resonates through all of our strategies, which is pretty unique.

Now Marc, you are a veteran in the space. You're investor operator for over 30 years in digital infrastructure. How does the build-out of AI echo some of the prior technological shifts that we've seen in the past from Internet, mobile, cloud? How is this era similar or different?

Well, I think, first of all, it's similar in the sense that every seven years, we have this unique opportunity, these tectonic shifts. in technology where the hardware changes, the software changes and the customer business models slightly change. And so we have to re-underwrite our customers every seven years. It's kind of fun actually. And so part of my job is, as the CEO of the firm is I always get the opportunity to go out and I talk to customers. I think I get my best applied learnings when I'm sitting with the CEO of one of the hyperscalers or like tonight, I leave for Germany to go sit at a Board meeting with Deutsche Telekom, where I learned a lot from the leadership at DT. And these unique relationships that I've built over 30 years provides me insight and it really guides how I'm thinking about how I allocate capital. And again, that's where we are a little bit different than the other guys because where I'm seeing opportunity isn't exactly where the other guys are seeing opportunity. I see it from a customer perspective. I see it at the ground floor. And I think that really informs our decision-making about where we deploy capital. So that's pretty exciting. So a lot of this is kind of the same. But here's what's happening with AI that's really different is just at a zero, literally at zero. So if public cloud was essentially a 30-gigawatt opportunity, and we deployed circa, call it, $700 billion to $900 billion of CapEx. Well, here comes AI. We're deploying $7 trillion of CapEx. We're deploying 300 gigawatts of power and just the magnitude and the scale of what's happening is hard to really digest. And I remember the first time we had a mobile carrier in the '90s say they were going to spend $100 million of CapEx. I was like, hey, $100 million of CapEx, that's huge. Think about where we've evolved from digital PCS in the late '90s to really thinking about inference and generative AI and where we're going with these applications, which, by the way, most of that data will run through your phone, right? As we think about the extension of generative AI and inferencing, it's all going to happen mobile. And what's really unique about the ecosystem in AI is it permeates through everything that we do. So again, whether it's credit, whether it's core, whether it's core plus, these strategies are all tethered to this AI thematic. And then it comes back to the fun part as an asset allocator, how is DigitalBridge deploying that capital? How are we thinking about it? What's different about what we're doing versus what Blackstone is doing versus what Brookfield is doing and what KKR is doing. And I think for us, again, that industrial approach is the edge. We're seeing more at bats. We can be more discerning. In a big DigitalBridge fund, like our current third flagship fund, -- we have a real big advantage there because we're taking 10 to 14 positions in digital infrastructure in North America, Europe and Asia, and we're investing in fiber and cell towers and data centers. So building a diversified portfolio is very different than building a generalist fund. So if I've got some new shiny $25 billion infrastructure fund, and I'm telling investors, I'm going to allocate 20% to 25% in digital, it means you're using two bullets for digital. You better get it right because if you miss on one of them and the other one goes okay, you actually end up hurting the fund. So investing in digital is not for tourist. It's a complicated industry. And I think the other thing that hasn't changed about whether it was towers in the '90s, fiber in the early 2000s, public cloud 10 years ago, AI today. At every iteration, every decade, you do have these big secular trends and you have what I call late capital arriving to the game. And so what's interesting about AI is you have a ton of capital inflows coming from real estate and generalists that are now seeing that digital is a great way to deploy capital quickly and build your AUM. And so you get a lot of people that are chasing a secular trend, but don't have that industrial background and don't have that framework where they've been building for customers for 30 years. So this is a real chance for us to differentiate and show to LPs that we can be differentiated. And I think in this environment, you have to be differentiated. I just got done -- I was on a 3-week roadshow between the U.S., Europe and the Gulf seeing investors. And never before has it been more important to have a track record and most importantly, to have a specialist approach where you have unique and proprietary deal flow. The first thing that LPs sit down and talk to us about, they say is, hey, look, it's great. We're happy to see you again. Let's first talk about your track record. How much money have you given back to us in the last 24 months? And then the second thing they say is immediately say is, okay, what's your best co-investment idea? And how are you going to show me something unique and proprietary? The great thing about us is we generally have anywhere between 3 to 8 co-investments happening at the same time. And so the conversation that I can have with a sovereign wealth fund or a pension fund actually is differentiated from what a Blackstone or a Brookfield can say because I can sit there and say, well, actually, where do you want to be? Okay, you want to be in Asia. Great. You want to be in fiber, you want to be in data centers. You want to be in towers, you want to be exposed to AI, mobility, -- what do you want? We can curate digital opportunities for LPs that other GPs cannot just because of the depth of what we're doing, the depth of the product set, the depth of the geography and the depth of the portfolio of companies and customers we have. So that's where we have to lay our stake because I can't compete with the other guys in terms of size and volume. But what I would say is LPs really do appreciate that specialization. And they appreciate the fact that I can curate a portfolio for them that's based on currency, geography, subsector, asset class and customer mix. The depth at which we can go and underwrite is just a different level. And that's really for us why we've been able to attract so much capital last year and why we're attracting a lot of capital this year. So far, so good.

And how sophisticated are these LPs? Are they just in their early innings in terms of allocating to infrastructure? And how has that tone shifted over the last 2 or 3 years?

I would say the sophisticated LPs today, again, this is just very fresh, having just come off the road. the sophisticated ones almost have a -- they're almost a little bit jaded about digital, which is interesting in the sense that they sort of laugh. There's kind of an inside joke of, oh, I only got presented 50 data center deals this week, and they laugh with us. We say that's nice. Let's talk about the data center deal you really want to do, and then we get into it. And I think the fact that we can quickly drill down into specifically what they want based on, again, geography, what type of data centers they want, what's the credit quality they want, what's the exposure? Do they want yield? Do they want total return? That layer of intricacies that I can go into with a client is a very different conversation than, let's say, a real estate fund that comes along, whether it's -- I won't name names, but they say, oh, I have this data center project in Dublin, and you have to be in it. And the LP just goes, well, what's unique about? They go, well, it's a data center deal. And they go, no, no, tell us what's really unique about it. And they don't have an answer. And I think that uniqueness around what's happening today is what gets LPs excited. And so for us, we're not pitching AI data centers. That was yesterday's idea. And I think if you're pitching AI data centers today at LPs, you're late. That's my sort of take on it. I think the real differentiation today with sophisticated investors is how are you going to power the AI economy? And how do you take that power and tether it to a customer, which is a data center, right, essentially. And so the different ways that you can power the AI economy and tether that to a long-term contracted obligation with a customer is exactly what sophisticated LPs want to talk about because they really want to understand that not only do you have the land and you have the customer, but how are you going to activate the customer? Because ultimately, bringing that power into the data hall and lighting up those GPUs and understanding how to cool it correctly and understanding how the data center doesn't go down and having the backup power and the battery sets and the microgrids and all the stuff that you need to be competitive, those are the solution sets that we're bringing to LPs today. And they really appreciate it. And so we spent this last sort of 30 days on the road talking about that. For us, it's about really going to the next place, not the trick that we were -- we were pitching data centers seven years ago. So now we're not pitching that. We're saying, look, you've got to be in power and you've got to ultimately figure out the right capital for how these data centers get to the next place, which is maturation. So as the investment cycle moves through, I'm thinking about how do we take really good investment-grade data centers and move them to the rightful place, which is probably insurance money, real estate capital, right? So these are the things that we're talking about on the road today with LPs and the receptivity has been strong. It's been a very, very good last 30 days in terms of fundraising. I think we got through the bumpiness of the sort of tariff trade. That's kind of leveled out. I think we don't obviously know where it's going to completely level out, but there was a little bit of a denominator effect going on with LPs in April. That's calmed down now. So the auction is kind of out of the room a little bit. And I think in certain locations, particularly in the GCC and here home in the U.S. with U.S. pensions, we're seeing investors allocate and they're putting capital to work in good ideas, fresh ideas, new ideas around the AI economy. And that's what our job is between now and the end of the year is to continue to evangelize what's really happening in AI and the challenges around the grid and the challenges that exist with the regulators around how to ultimately navigate baseload. And it's exciting. I mean I think some of the things that we're doing in power are very differentiated and I think will be the stuff that people will talk about over the next 10 years.

And maybe double-clicking into your fundraising targets. I think you've laid out a road map to grow fee-earning AUM to over $40 billion through the course of this year from $35 billion, of which includes about $5 billion to $6 billion of gross fundraising. So maybe you can just remind us of the key contributors and any updates on how that's trending this year?

Yes. So good second quarter. Here to say we're on track. dare to say we're probably better than on track. I think the capital that we have formed here in the second quarter is really tethered to some great unique proprietary ideas. And most importantly, we're getting paid for those ideas. So I think we articulated that I looked at this year as kind of a European football match that will be played in kind of two halves. The first half of our year was really dedicated to finishing out our Fund III and our Credit Fund II strategies, which investors are still allocating to and are really receptive to that. The second piece to that was making sure that we beat our guidance on co-investments and that we get paid for co-investments because that was something we didn't do as good a job last year, and I told the Street we would do a better job. So I think both of those goals were achieved in Q1 and Q2. We've had strong receptivity in co-investments. We've had strong investment activity in Fund III and Fund II. And we're exactly where we want to be. I'd actually say I think I'm a little ahead of where I want to be. And now we're coming into the launch of our new strategies. So part of this roadshow that began three weeks ago, four weeks ago on the West Coast of the U.S. and finished up last week in the Gulf was a chance to get out and talk about power and talk about real estate. So why power, why real estate? Why are these the two new strategies that DigitalBridge has embarked on? Well, power was logical. We own over 300 data centers. We have 16.8 gigawatts of power. That's essentially almost 3.5 New York cities, just to contextualize it correctly. And currently, we're building another 3 gigawatts of power. We've got about 100 data centers in construction. And so we sit in a really unique position, which is we own the data center, and we own the customer relationship. And we've been generally allowing the publicly traded utility companies to benefit and arbitrage our power. And it is our power. It's our power that serves our customers. So what we've discovered in the last two to three years is we think there's an opportunity to own that active and passive infrastructure adjacent to the data center that controls the flow power in and out of our data centers. And at the same time, just taking a page out of my old playbook from 20 years ago, one thing I learned about fiber is fiber really works well when you interconnect it to other fiber networks. Well, guess what? Power is the same. When you learn to take your power, sell that power, your excess power into the grid and you can trade that power on the grid, you don't have to trade it just with one source of power. If you're interconnected, you can actually trade to -- for example, if I had a huge data center in Reno, Nevada, I happen to have a huge data center in Reno, Nevada. And we have a great relationship with Nevada Power and Light, but we have our own microgrid in a place like Reno. And in Reno, it's really unique because that grid cross connects to actually five other huge utilities. So if I don't like the spot rate where I have excess power to Nevada Power & Light, I don't have to sell to them. I can sell that power into Puget Power, I can sell it to Portland General. I can sell it to Pacific Gas and Electric. So we have this unique opportunity to take advantage of our surplus in power and trade it. And meanwhile, the undercurrent of that microgrid is it's tethered to 4 or 5 key customers that have signed long-term 10- to 15-year contracts on PPAs. And you understand the PPA business quite well from other alternative asset managers. So imagine, Stephanie, you have a business where you have a PPA that is a 10- to 15-year contract with an investment-grade customer, growing at 2% to 3%. And that basically essentially underwrites your whole microgrid. Now you layer on top of that, like a cell tower, the second customer, the third customer and the fourth customer where you're selling power in your data center. Then you have this new opportunity, which is you sell the excess power at a 2x, 3x premium to the grid to other utility providers. Now that's no longer a 12% IRR. That's not an infrastructure return. I'm not going to tell you what the returns are, but you start getting into a really exciting space. So we built a couple of our own microgrids. We got smarter about it. We found a really great industrial partner to work with in this new strategy. We currently have $13 billion to $14 billion of opportunity to build what I call grid independent power to the AI economy. We don't think anyone is doing what we're doing because we have such a large data center portfolio, and we have so many customers, all the power we're building, we can tether to a customer like that. That's very unique. Again, the DigitalBridge advantage. We talk about that. Why are the things that we're doing different than what our peers are doing. When you have such a big network of infrastructure, you can leverage it just the same way we leverage our fiber. When you own 300 data centers, guess where you can sell your fiber to your 300 data centers. So I'm trying to find adjacencies where we can be unique and we can be differentiated and we can create risk-adjusted returns that are better than our peers. And I think that's what's exciting about power. That's what we're doing in power today. So I'm really energized, no pun intended about what we're doing in power because I think it's unique. I think it's differentiated. And again, it's back to that core underwriting requirement, it's tethered to an investment-grade customer. And that's what investors like. LPs get really excited about this. So we had the chance to talk to a lot of investors in the last 30 days about that product, that strategy, and everyone is really fired up about it. So where we guided the Street to is we formally have launched two new strategies. I'll get to real estate in a second, but Power is launched, Digital Power is launched. And we said, look, we'll have results that will contribute to FRE in fourth quarter. But really turning the corner to 2026, these two flagship products and strategies will be what really drive FRE earnings next year. And so power is a big opportunity. If AI is a $7 trillion opportunity to power AI is probably somewhere about $1.3 trillion to $1.5 trillion of new infrastructure. So we look at that, we say, wow, that's a lot of capital. And our ambition is obviously not $1.3 trillion to $1.5 trillion of opportunity, but we definitely know that there's a piece there for us, just like there's a piece for other asset managers. I think Brookfield talks a lot about this, powering the AI economy. And we agree with Bruce and Sam. They understand it, where it's going and KKR talks about it. And I'm sure Jonathan Gray will be talking about it next quarter. Power is important. It's the key ingredient to power this next generation of data centers. Now as we build all this power and we build all these data centers, we have this, what I call capital recycling problem. And -- all of us in the alternative asset management space today, we know what our challenge is, which is we have to return capital. It's an absolute critical component. We talked about it on our quarterly call. In the last 24 months, now probably more like 30 months, we've had nine exits, and we've returned about $12 billion in DPI. That's a lot of capital to return back to LPs. And people ask, well, why -- how were you guys able to form over $28 billion of capital last year? I said, well, we returned a lot of capital. And this year, we're on a cadence to raise probably $20-plus billion of capital again between debt and equity. And again, how do we do it? Well, we're recycling capital. We're putting capital back into our LPs' pockets. And at the same time, we're also leveraging our platforms and we're creating this road -- this sort of freeway of conduit into the ABS and CMBS market. We're a serial issuer into that space. We pioneered the cell tower securitization, the fiber securitization, data center securitization. Anything around digital, we've been the pioneer of how to finance that from an esoteric perspective. And so that's worked out really well for us. So we've been able to form capital. And that's a big -- for the size of the firm we are to essentially raise 20% to 25% of your capital base every year, that's hard to do. But we're doing it, and we're sort of punching above our weight class. And the big opportunity in real estate is I look at the real estate pool because of our merger with Colony, we got to really understand the real estate business. And we had a real estate funds business, which we sold to Fortress. But when we sold that business, we had done a lot of work around sort of the TAM in real estate. And what we saw was a $3.9 trillion LP marketplace shrinking to $3.7 trillion and possibly shrinking further to $3.6 trillion to $3.5 trillion. Now what is happening in alts? Why is the real estate allocation shrinking? And why are other asset classes growing like infrastructure, which when I got in infrastructure a decade ago, infrastructure was like barely like $600 billion. Today, it's $1.3 trillion going to $1.5 trillion. And look, everyone agrees. I think Blackstone agrees, Larry Fink agrees, and I'm sure Bruce Flatt agrees. Infrastructure is a growing part of the vertical. And as we look in alts, everyone is trying to get in infrastructure. And meanwhile, real estate is shrinking. I look at real estate, and I'm sort of unconventional, I say that's an opportunity. I see that $3.7 trillion pool of capital, I think I can go compete for that because what I'm selling is unique real estate. And so we launched a strategy to really focus on data center properties that are mature and that are income producing. And that really, at the end of the day, shouldn't be sitting in a private equity fund or an infrastructure fund. They should be sitting in a real estate vehicle where insurance companies and real estate allocators really appreciate yield and they appreciate safety. Those are really the two things that investment-grade data centers can operate so can offer to LPs. So we've -- we've created a strategy to go out and own and operate the best investment-grade data centers in the world. They're not going to be cheap. We recognize that those assets are valuable. But we also recognize that we have great relationships with other GPs. We've done deals with every GP that I've mentioned on the stage today has been our partner before or is our partner today. And the reality is we've already created some yieldcos where we've recycled assets, so we understand how to do it. The customers trust us because you need a consent when you transfer a data center, you need the customer approval. And I think other GPs trust us. My partner, Ben worked at Blackstone for 16 years, and I ran a portfolio company for them, and we have the highest respect for those guys. So we're going to buy assets from other GPs. We're going to build a really sizable vehicle to go do this. It will be a big strategy for us. And we think we're helping the ecosystem evolve. And the evolution of data centers is going to be return of capital. And then ultimately, pairing those assets correctly with the right form of equity and the right form of debt where we can get investors -- certain investors what they want, which is that yield and they want that safety, where they're okay with a 10% to 13% IRR so long as the yield is somewhere between 5% and 7%. So I think Blue Owl talks a lot about that, the sort of pairing of liabilities against yields. And so we agree with Marc and his team on that. So that's a big opportunity for us. And so again, coming back to what we are at DigitalBridge and sort of putting a pin in all this, it's at the end of the day, it's taking our expertise and the sort of -- if this were a wheel and you had to think about hubs and spokes, the hub is our intense knowledge in digital and our discipline around underwriting and really being able to spot opportunities before others can spot them. If I can continue to do that, we're going to continue to grow, raise capital, scale and widen the aperture, which is what I'm trying to do right now. And at the same time, bring discipline and rigor. And we've been very focused in the last two quarters, cutting cost, improving margins. I've committed to grow our margins by 300 to 500 basis points this year. And we're on the right track. We had a really good fourth quarter print. We had a very good first quarter print. And I think as in our first year as an asset manager, this will be our first full year as an asset manager, it's about building that relationship with these new investors, credibility, beating expectations and really starting to explore how we get those shareholders to come to us.

Great. Thank you so much for the insightful conversation. We only got to about 1/3 of my questions.

I know I'm sorry.

But I'll have to leave it there. Thank you so much, Marc, for joining us today.

Thank you. Appreciate it.