Brookfield (BN-T) announced Wednesday morning a US$100-billion investment strategy, in partnership with NVIDIA and the Kuwait Investment Authority, which is designed to keep the Canadian company at the forefront of the global artificial intelligence infrastructure race.

A cornerstone of the strategy will be the Brookfield Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Fund (BAIIF), launched today with a target of $10 billion (all figures US) of initial equity commitments to invest across the full spectrum of AI infrastructure assets. Among the target sectors are energy, development land, data centres and computing.

“AI is creating one of the largest infrastructure buildouts in history, comparable to the formation of the modern power grid and global telecom networks, but unfolding at a far greater pace and significantly larger scale,” Sikander Rashid, head of AI infrastructure at Brookfield, said in the announcement. “This buildout will require $7 trillion of capital in the next 10 years across the entire AI value chain including power, compute, data centres, and beyond.

“We are thrilled to formally launch our dedicated AI program in partnership with NVIDIA and others to deliver this infrastructure at speed, at scale, and to the highest standard for enterprises, technology firms, and sovereign governments.”

Rather than investing in the actual development of the AI technology, Brookfield's strategy is to provide the extensive, and costly, physical infrastructure required to support the sector.

Initial $5B in equity commitments

BAIIF has already received $5 billion of capital commitments from a group of institutional and industry partners, including Brookfield, NVIDIA and KIA. Together with additional capital from co-investors and financing, the fund is to acquire up to $100 billion of AI infrastructure assets.

BAIIF will focus on investing in the physical infrastructure assets that underpin the delivery of AI, across four verticals: 

• AI Factories primarily built on NVIDIA’s DSX Vera Rubin-ready reference design;
• dedicated behind-the-meter power solutions; 
• compute infrastructure including integrated solutions tailored for governments and leading global enterprises; and
• strategic adjacencies and capital partnerships across the entire AI value chain. 

Brookfield will seed the fund with a $5-billion framework agreement with Bloom Energy to install up to one gigawatt of behind-the-meter power solutions for data centres and AI factories.

It is also launching Radiant, a new NVIDIA Cloud Partner, to provide full-stack AI services leveraging Brookfield’s global land, power and data centre infrastructure. Radiant will build AI factories based on the NVIDIA DSX platform and provide direct support to Brookfield’s sovereign AI programs. 

Finally, Brookfield announced “landmark partnerships” in France and Sweden to support national AI ambitions with up to $30 billion of combined AI Infrastructure investment.

The release does not specifically mention a Canadian component to the investments, but Brookfield Renewables already operates a number of facilities in the country, and Brookfield owns or holds interests in several data centre operators including firms with facilities in Canada.

Both these infrastructure-related sectors would, presumably, be included in Brookfield’s growth plans. RENX has requested additional information from Brookfield, but as of publishing has not received a reply.

Brookfield's $100B in related infra investments

Brookfield is already a major international owner and operator of AI infrastructure assets, with over $100 billion already invested in digital infrastructure and clean power.

“AI is transforming every industry, and like electricity, it will require every nation to build the infrastructure to power it. AI infrastructure demands land, power, and purpose-built supercomputers — and our partnership with Brookfield brings all of these elements together in a ready-to-deploy AI cloud,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said in the announcement. “We’re thrilled that Radiant, Brookfield’s AI cloud service, is building an NVIDIA GPU cloud based on the NVIDIA DSX blueprint to deliver Vera Rubin–ready AI infrastructure — fast to deploy and designed to scale with the world’s growing intelligence needs.”

Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. (BAM-T) is a global alternative asset manager, founded in Canada and now headquartered in New York. It has over $1 trillion of assets under management across infrastructure, renewable power and transition, private equity, real estate, and credit. 

It offers a range of alternative investment products including public and private pension plans, endowments and foundations, sovereign wealth funds, financial institutions, insurance companies and private wealth investors.