Thank you, Scott. From private credits to our private infrastructure. Hello, everyone. It's a privilege to be here today, my first BlackRock Investor Day. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Raj Rao, I'm a founding partner of GIP, and currently served as its President and Chief Operating Officer. I'm based here in New York, but for the first 17 of the 19 years of GIP's history, I was based in London. GIP is now a part of BlackRock, a combination that we are incredibly excited about as we are entering the golden age of private infrastructure.
Now when we started GIP 19 years ago, infrastructure as an asset class did not exist. So we're trying to raise capital for our first fund and we'll go to an institution, and they sometimes send us to the private equity team, sometimes to the real estate team, sometimes to the fixed income team. And you know what sometimes even to the agri and timber team that go and talk to these guys.
Infrastructure has come a very, very long way. It's an asset class that is here to stay and it is an asset class that is going to continue to grow. So we are pioneers of the space. And as of today, we absolutely define the asset class. So our AUM has grown from pretty much nothing in 2006 when we started to $183 billion today.
So I'm going to cover 3 things today. One, the scale and the breadth of our platform; second, a multi-decade opportunity of infrastructure ahead of us; and third, the power of the BlackRock GIP combination. So Scott, you mentioned this, Rob, you said I had to deliver 1 message, and I'm going to give only 1 message, no parts to that, just 1 message. And the message is very simple. Our aim and our goal is to be the premier infrastructure investing platform globally and we at BlackRock, have the opportunity, and we are extremely well positioned to capture that.
So let me give -- begin by giving you a quick overview of the GIP infra platform. So $183 billion under management, 19-year track record started in 2006, actually July 1. So in a couple of weeks, we will be exactly 19 years. The founders started the business, and then we were backed by Credit Suisse and GE as our founding investors back in 2006. 683 professionals today in more than 20 countries, we have more than 900 LP relationships.
As a part of the transaction, BlackRock transferred around $50 billion of AUM and 200 professionals into the platform to the combined platform and the combined platform is now called GIP, a part of BlackRock. So we have a wide range of products. As you can see on the slide here, they're all differentiated. They're differentiated by scale, by geography, by risk and return, and they're all catering to the needs of our clients. So the biggest piece of our AUM is our global equity business. That's about $111 billion. That's where the flagship fund sits and we've got 3 strategies there. The GIP flagship strategy, the mid-market strategy and the core strategy.
So GIP's flagship strategy is now in its fifth vintage. We had a target of $25 billion to achieve. And I'm pleased to say that we have managed to get to $25 billion for our fifth vintage. Mid-market fund is already fourth vintage and will soon be into its fifth vintage.
We also have a few specialized and thematic by sector and by geography funds. The AI partnership, which I will touch upon later on, energy transition, renewables, a decarbonization joint venture with Temasek that invested in early-stage energy transition companies. And we have a few single asset continuation funds. These are for some of our best assets. So 50% of Gatwick that we own, 50% of Edinburgh are in separate continuation funds. We also have 2 other funds. One is TiL, which is our partnership with MSC, a port platform that we have and also Italo, a high-speed rail business in Italy.
Geographic focus, we have a few subs -- we have a few geographic sector funds, Australia, emerging markets and the Middle East. Our credit business is around $28 billion, both investment-grade credit and noninvestment-grade credit. A substantial portion of this credit business came from BlackRock. And then we have a solutions business that does multi-manager portfolios, secondaries and primaries. That's about $9 billion.
Now the secondaries business -- sorry, the solutions business with investors in GIP's first fund, way back in 2006 and they have been investors in GIP subsequent vintages all along the way. So I'm sure a part of the performance of GIP has helped the solution business to raise the $9 billion they have. So what's the beauty of the combination? Very limited overlap between what BlackRock had in infrastructure and what we had in GIP.
We did not have a mid-market franchise. We did not have a solutions business. We did not have an investment-grade credit business, and we did not have an energy transition business from a decarbonization early-stage growth vehicle point of view. All of those enhance our platform tremendously. When you look at the overlap of the LPs between what GIP had and BlackRock Infra had, that was less than 5%, less than 5% overlap between our LP base. So today, we are fully integrated. We operate as 1 platform. We're all sitting together in 1 location in this building in Hudson Yards in New York. We are sharing resources. We are sharing origination ideas. We're sharing our business improvement team and we're sharing our risk processes.
So let me start by explaining what our definition. And there are many different definitions in the market of infrastructure is. Our definition is very, very simple, large real, difficult to replicate critical infrastructure with extremely high barriers to entry. So think about big airports, big ports, big LNG facilities, big offshore wind farms. These are long-lived assets, 50-plus years with fair regulation and fully contracted revenues.
Now over the last 19 years, as the asset class has grown, people have stretched the definition of infrastructure, added risk on to it. We have not done that. Since the beginning, our sector focus has remained the same. Our target returns have remained the same. Our investment approach has remained the same. We have not had a sector drift. We only focus on 4 sectors, which is energy, transportation, digital and water and waste. And even in those 4 sectors, we target few subsectors, not every subsector of those.
So let me touch upon each of those. Energy is our biggest business. It's our biggest sector. So what do we do? We invest in midstream companies, LNG, power generation, renewables. We do not take direct commodity risk. We are a global top 10 player in the renewable business today. Our portfolio of renewables, where we've invested more than $20 billion of equity is about 18 gigawatts in operation, operates all over the world, and we have a platform and a development pipeline of more than 180 gigawatts.
So you'll see some logos here. Atlas is a leading Latin American platform. Clearway is a leading U.S. renewable platform. [ Wien Energie ] is a leading pan-Asian renewable platform. RG LNG, very exciting. It's an 18 million-tonne facility that we are currently building in Brownsville in Texas and soon to be 30 million tonnes of capacity.
Now transportation is our second sector. We are only focused on 3 subsectors: airports, ports and rail. Those are the 3 subsectors we focus on. There is no other manager out there who has got better track record in airport space. We have to date invested in 6 different airports. London City Airport, we met 4.5x money multiples. Gatwick, we made 8x money multiple. Edinburgh, we made 6x money multiple. Now we still own Edinburgh and Gatwick with the continuation fund that I talked about. We are the largest shareholder in Sydney Airport. And very recently, we took the entire Malaysian airport system private working with 2 sovereign wealth funds. So that's not only KL, which is a capital city, but there are 38 other airports in the Malaysian airport system.
Ports, a big area that we've invested in. We've been owners of Port of Brisbane, large shareholder in Port of Melbourne, Peel Ports. And we have a joint venture with the largest container shipping business in the world called MSC, the ports business called TiL. That's the platform through which we have recently announced the Hutchinson transaction.
Digital, one of our newer sectors over the last 7 or 8 years focused again on 3 subsectors, telecom towers, fiber and data centers. In the tower space, we have a joint venture with Vodafone with more than 30,000 towers in Europe. Data center, we have a business called CyrusOne. That is the America's third-largest data center company. And CyrusOne was pretty instrumental when I come on to the AI partnership. I refer to it back again.
In fiber, we have a joint venture with AT&T called Gigapower. And the fourth sector is water and waste. Smallest of our sectors, but we have a few more marquee assets. Suez, a global #2 in water and waste. And then we have the Lanes Group and E360. So the message you have on this slide for me is that we focus on very few sectors. We have deep industry knowledge. We have phenomenal corporate relationships. We get proprietary origination, and we will add operational value add. I'll come on to that in a minute.
So let me set the scene on private infrastructure landscape. We're entering the golden age. Capital needs over the next 2 decades are going to be double of what was spent over the last 2 decades. That's the scale of the opportunities, and that's driven by 4 key things: energy transition, what's happening in the digital space, rewiring of supply chains and quite often neglected but true, the [ creaking ] and the upgradation of old infrastructure that is absolutely essential.
So energy transition. It is here to say. It is irreversible. Now we can debate whether the world is going to get to its 2050 net zero targets. Are they going to beat it or are we going to get close to it? The fact is money is being spent in the space, and that is going to continue to be the case. The numbers for around here are big. $100 trillion of capital will be spent in energy transition. We think roughly about $40 trillion of that will be an infrastructure associated with energy transition.
Some of it will be repurposed infrastructure. Quite a lot of it will be new build infrastructure. Now digital, you all go through different places and you want mobile phones. Even if you're hiking in the mountains, you want your cell phone to work, right? When you're outside somewhere, you want to stream football, you want to get it very fast. We talk about cloud computing. That is creating a tremendous amount of opportunity for new build infrastructure.
Just on the data center alone, the existing installed capacity of data centers globally is about 60 gigawatts. By 2030, that's going to be 220 gigawatts. A large part of that is going to be driven by cloud computing. People think it's AI, AI is yet to come, a big piece of that. A large piece of that is cloud computing. And if you think about that, that's in the next 5 years, that's $1.5 trillion of capital that is needed just in the data center space. That does not include the chips and everything else that goes in. This is core and shell.
Supply chain rewiring. Now that started with COVID. It's sort of a sort of accelerated by Russia's invasion into Ukraine, and that concerns that created with security of supply -- geopolitical tensions, U.S.-China and now with the tariff. Factories are moving. You call it friend shoring, you call it near shoring. Factories are moving from one place to another. That requires a lot of capital to go in.
And then upgradation of infrastructure. I'm sure many of you have been through airports and road systems in the U.S., they need a lot of work. They need a lot of upgradation. I just pulled up a chart here, and this is a chart at the bottom right from the American Society of Civil Engineers. They grade once every 4 years, the state of American infrastructure and look at the grades they've given the U.S. infrastructure. C+, D+, D+, C.
Now if you have children and they brought these grades at home, I'm sure what the conversation is going to be. So the idea is the opportunity is huge. That's the point I want to make. So who's going to fund this, right? What's the traditional source of funding infrastructure? It's governments. It's multilateral agencies.
Now if you're not a government in the Middle East, then you have very great difficulty in funding infrastructure today or big capital projects. And the reason for that is simple. Pretty much every government around the world, OECD, talk about the U.S., talk about the U.K., Eurozone, Japan, is either close to 100% or more than 100% debt-to-GDP ratio. So they are not in a position to fund this.
So what's the second source? Corporates. Corporates will play a big part, definitely. But corporate balance sheets are stretched. And as you heard, if you think interest rates are going to rise, that's going to create that funding constraint is going to grow more and more from a corporate perspective. Capital markets are definitely going to be part of the solution, but they're not going to fill the gap. The gap is about $15 trillion. That could be $20 trillion. The only way place that gets filled is private capital. That's where we come in. That's where we fit.
So this is long-dated infrastructure needs to be funded in the long-dated market, long-dated private credit, long-dated private infrastructure. That's the gap that we're going to fill. So let me just talk a little bit about GIP and what differentiates us.
What's our secret sauce? I think there are 5 things that differentiate us massively. The first is proprietary origination. We are control-oriented investors. So we take control positions in the equity. So I'm just going to use numbers which are flagship fund oriented. Obviously, we have equity funds, specialized funds that I talked about. So these numbers don't include that just by flagship fund. To date, we've done 53 equity transactions. Out of the 53 transactions, 30 of them are corporate joint ventures.
So this is what's the corporate joint venture. We go to a company and say, "Look, you have this embedded piece of infrastructure that's sitting inside your company. That's a cost center to that. All you need is access to that. We're going to come in. We're going to buy half of it. So you retain 50% of the business. We will work with you. We'll get our business improvement team in. We'll improve the operations of the asset. By the way, we will get incremental growth by getting third party in. And as we create value in the asset, you will get your pro rata share of the value, and we have released a significant piece of capital to you. That mantra has worked very, very well for us.
And as the beauty of the BlackRock combination, our access now at the senior most level to all corporates have stepped up massively. So just to give you a sense that this is working, we've done 4 different transactions with Total. We've done 4 different transactions with Ørsted. We've done 3 different transactions with MSC. We've done 2 different transactions with [ Vonceia ] and that list goes on and on and on.
The second is business improvement. Now we are a pioneer in operating assets in the infrastructure space. And I want to take you back to Fund I.
And the reason I want to take you back to Fund I is simple. When we were raising capital for Fund I, we were saying to investors, infrastructure assets are under managed. They have historically been owned by utilities or corporates or governments. They have not been put to the rigor of an industrial company. If we can operate assets better, we will generate incremental return.
Now most others were saying infrastructure is boring. You buy it, it's a bond, you will get a yield, forget it. Now life has not turned out to be that way. So with that mantra, we started a business improvement team. That's about 50 people today. We have a proven playbook, use tools like Six Sigma, Kaizen, Lean and the business improvement team of GIP works with the deal team while we're doing due diligence, as soon as we acquire the asset, prepare the 100-day plan, continue to work with the asset as we grow the asset and help us in thinking through the business plan when we sell the asset from as to how we're going to position the asset in the future.
So let me give you a couple of examples. What is -- what is an airport? An airport is a place where you move people, you move bags and you turn around planes. Now if I can move people faster and if I can move planes, turn around planes quicker, and if I can get you through your bags in time, my customers are happy. Who's a customer of an airport? People like you and the airlines. If you are happy, you're going to spend money. If airlines are happy, they're going to put routes. As soon as you do that, we get more revenue as an airport owner. So that is the nature of what we've done with the business improvement team.
The third is risk. We have an independent risk function completely dissociated with the deal, looked at every deal objectively. We focus on core and core plus. We hedge everything. We think about downsides. We think a little bit like credit. What is the downside? How do we make sure we never lose equity? And the proof of this is simple.
When COVID happened, we had airports that had 0 traffic. We had high-speed rail, which is 0 traffic. We had oil and gas pipelines all went down to 0. We did not put a single penny of equity in any of our deals. That's the risk approach that we have. Sustainability, we think about every asset from a sustainability point of view. We have an idea of giving every asset a net zero target. And sometimes 2030, sometimes 2040, sometimes 2050. And the reason we do that is we track, we work with the management team, we report it to our LPs. But most importantly, when we exit an asset, we want that asset to be very well positioned so that the new buyer can take that forward.
The last is a proven track record and exit. This is a huge differentiator for us. Across the flagship deals out of the 53 deals I talked about, we have exited 28 deals. We've invested $48 billion. We have returned $56 billion. We have returned $56 billion. There aren't that many investors in infrastructure who have invested $56 billion. We have returned $56 billion. As I go on the road, we consistently hear that private equity hasn't returned capital.
Now we had GIP, I don't think we got that memo. And the reason we didn't get that memo is since COVID, we have returned $28 billion back to our LP. So that's the big differentiator.
Now let me just talk about the BlackRock-GIP combination. We got many approaches to sort of partner up with GIP along the way. We turned all of them down. So when BlackRock approaches, Larry and Martin came to talk to us, we took it seriously. We took it seriously for many reasons. One, the power of the BlackRock franchise. Second, the complementary fit of the organizations. The third, the potential and the tremendous growth opportunity for the platform under the BlackRock ownership. But most importantly, and Scott, you touched on this, the culture, the founder-led culture. That is exactly how we think about. So from an ability to get things done, we thought about it the same way.
So we actually had a dinner. We had a dinner after we agreed commercial terms before we made the announcement, it was somewhere in the floor or a fourth floor of Hudson Yards, and we meant to be there for 2 hours. We ended up spending 3.5 hours at dinner, and we have a WhatsApp group among the founder. And as we all left back and there were messages flying around, and we all said this was amazing. The cultural fit is phenomenal, and we have not looked back since that day.
So let me just give you 3 examples of areas where the combination adds tremendous and enhances our capabilities. Origination. This is what I talked about, proprietary origination with corporates. Now BlackRock being the largest shareholder or the largest bondholder of many of the biggest corporations in the world, we now have access to the [ city ] most decision-makers in big companies. That enables proprietary origination.
Institutional relationship, wealth channel, again, very limited overlap. So there's a whole set of institutional relationship. We hardly had a wealth channel at GIP. So our ability to tap into new investors from a capital raising perspective, very, very powerful. Technology, Aladdin, eFront, Preqin, they will all be value added to us. The insights we will get from BlackRock institution -- investment institute will make us better investors. That's the power of the combination.
Now I want to give you a case study of how this combination is coming in practice. It's actually one of the most exciting things happening at BlackRock, that's the AI partnership. Now I think it's fair to say that this would not have happened if it was only BlackRock. And I'm pretty much sure that GIP probably may not have been in the room -- may not have been in the room when these conversations were going on.
What are we trying to achieve? We are trying to capture a generational investment opportunity in artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure linked with AI. Our goal is simple. We are trying to create a funding mechanism to tackle the significant needs that exist. I talked about the $1.5 trillion over the next 5 years. Think about what that number is going forward. The industry needs a solution. So in that context, as we went around with BlackRock's connections and speaking to the biggest hyperscalers at the highest level of each organization, it became very, very clear that a combination of what GIP could bring to the table, what BlackRock could bring to the table, what the hyperscalers could bring to the table will create an industry-wide solution. So you've seen the announcement we made in September.
And since then, we have expanded the partnership. We now have 8 partners in the partnership. BlackRock, GIP, MGX from Abu Dhabi, a long-term patient capital from the UAE, a big investor in the technology space. We know about Microsoft, NVIDIA and xAI. Very recently, last week, the KIA, Kuwait Investment Authority announced that they'll be a part of the partnership. And I'm pleased to say, as of today, that Temasek has agreed to be a part of the partnership as well. So KIA and Temasek were not part of the original group. They are going to be big investors in the fund going forward.
So in addition to the members of the partnership, we have a few technical collaborators on the power and the technology side. So GE Vernova, NextEra and Cisco will provide a lot of information to us and be collaborative partners on us. So what are we trying to do? We're trying to raise a $30 billion pool of capital, equity capital, in an open-ended format. We'll unlock about $100 billion pool of capital because with the debt, that is the power of what we will have. Now we are currently working on the structure and the terms of this. So stay tuned, more to come on this.
Let's talk about the future. We are in a strong position to capitalize on all the demands that I talked about. Look at the chart on the bottom left, that is the fundraising track record of the flagship fund of GIP. We started at $5.6 billion for Fund I. Our target for GIP V was $25 billion. We've reached that target of $25 billion.
Now over the next 24 months, we have more opportunities, the AI partnership that I talked about, middle market, energy transition, emerging market, Decarb Partners, credit, both on the investment-grade side and noninvestment grade side in infrastructure and solution. Our strategies are working. Our strategies are performing. We have a phenomenal track record and the combination with BlackRock positions us really, really well for the future.
So let me conclude. You've heard this several times today. Everything that we do at BlackRock is about clients. And what we are trying to do is connect our clients with the best investment product that we have. I think Larry said it, infrastructure is one of the most exciting investment opportunities ahead. So 3 key final messages or 4 key final messages for me. We have the absolute ambition to be the world's premier infrastructure investing platform today, tomorrow, day after tomorrow and way beyond that as well.
We will continue to play a significant role in funding -- playing the funding gap that exists. We'll continue to focus on performance, deliver operational value add, and we will solidify BlackRock's leadership position in the private markets. Now as we embark on the golden age of infrastructure, we will capitalize on these tailwinds, both for our asset class and for private markets overall.
So I just want to end by saying a big thank you to all of you. It's been a great pleasure to be here. I believe it's now time for a break. So go ahead, stretch your legs, get a cup of coffee and see you back in 15 minutes.
