Investment in artificial intelligence has become the single most powerful driver of economic growth in the United States, according to executives at Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager. And the reason is not just software. It is infrastructure.

Speaking during recent earnings calls, Blackstone leaders emphasized that the global AI race is triggering an unprecedented build-out of physical assets. Data centers, semiconductor fabrication plants, energy generation and power distribution are all expanding at historic speed. This expansion, they say, is reshaping capital flows and creating long-term investment momentum.

Jon Gray, Blackstone’s president and chief operating officer, explained that AI development requires massive amounts of private debt and equity capital. Constructing chip fabs, hyperscale data centers and energy infrastructure is capital-intensive by nature, placing private investment firms at the center of the AI economy.

That strategy is already paying off. QTS, the data center operator Blackstone acquired in 2021, was the single largest contributor to gains across the firm’s $1.3 trillion portfolio in 2025. Blackstone co-founder Stephen Schwarzman now describes QTS as the world’s largest data center platform, a reflection of how central digital infrastructure has become to the firm’s performance.

Investor appetite mirrors this shift. Blackstone reported $239 billion in inflows last year, its strongest since 2021, driven largely by interest in AI-related assets. The firm’s infrastructure platform grew 40% year over year to $77 billion, delivering double-digit annual returns fueled primarily by data center appreciation.

While traditional real estate faced pressure, AI-aligned assets told a different story. Blackstone’s Real Estate Income Trust, heavily invested in QTS, generated returns that significantly outperformed its benchmark. At the same time, private credit has emerged as another major beneficiary of AI expansion, as hundreds of billions of dollars will be needed to finance construction, energy supply and manufacturing.

Beyond data centers, Blackstone has built exposure across the AI ecosystem, including investments in Anthropic, OpenAI, high-performance computing providers and energy utilities such as TXNM Energy. The firm has also backed infrastructure operators like CoreWeave, reinforcing its thesis that AI growth is as much about power and concrete as it is about algorithms.

Blackstone’s message is clear: the AI boom is not a passing tech cycle. It is a structural transformation of the economy, powered by long-term investments in digital infrastructure. For firms positioned at the intersection of capital, construction and computing, AI is not just a technology trend. It is the growth engine of the decade.

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