BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is one of the most bullish people in the world about artificial intelligence, and he just announced another AI bet.
Speaking at the Milken conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Fink said his firm will announce a partnership with an unspecified hyperscaler later this week to build data centers.
“The future is today,” Fink said. BlackRock did not immediately return requests for comment.
He has positioned his $13.9 trillion asset manager to provide the financing for the technology’s buildout, with a focus on infrastructure such as data centers and energy investments. BlackRock’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Global Infrastructure Partners, a private market asset manager, in late 2024 was just one part of Fink’s broader ambitions. BlackRock has teamed with Microsoft, Nvidia, Abu Dhabi-backed investment fund MGX, and others to invest in data centers. The group, led by GIP, announced plans to buy Aligned Data Centers in a deal valued at about $40 billion last fall.
Other alternative asset managers are also pouring billions into AI infrastructure, even working together more often on deals rather than strictly competing. They’re also partnering on how to get more of their portfolio companies to use the tech. On Monday, private equity firm Blackstone and other managers announced a joint venture with Anthropic to ultimately create a playbook for companies to use the tech.
For their part, the four biggest hyperscalers, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google, have planned $725 billion in spending this year, which has some worried about the sheer size of the bet.
As Fink told the Milken audience, despite the astronomical funding figures announced every day by tech companies and AI-obsessed asset managers alike, “I ultimately think we are going to see a shortage of capital” to build out the needed infrastructure.
As Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt said on the same Milken panel, “We’re rewiring the world.”
“We’re short power, we’re short compute, we’re short chips,” Fink said, adding that he thinks there will one day be a new asset class of compute futures, to help companies hedge against a jump in compute costs like agriculture or energy companies do with certain crops or fuel sources.
“I don’t believe we’re moving fast enough,” he said. “There is not an AI bubble. There is the opposite.”
