Insights from March 2025 Conferences: Shaping the Future of Infrastructure and the Built Environment

CERAWeek (including Innovation Agora), the PEI Infrastructure Investor Global Summit, MIPIM, amongst others offer a vantage point into the transformation trends and convergence of infrastructure, energy, and real estate. InfraNEDs attend the key Real Assets Conferences and below share their insights with you:
1. Energy Transition and Infrastructure Investment
The energy transition is redefining investment strategies with a focus on portfolio diversification,
pragmatism, and resilience.
Investor Focus on Energy Transition and Digital Infrastructure:
The Infrastructure Investor Summit highlighted the growing interest in digital infrastructure assets and renewable energy. These investments tend to offer some degree of inflation protection and predictable, long duration cash flows while supporting decarbonisation efforts. The digital and power sectors are increasingly converging in a quest to optimise the usage of very constrained power grids, and investment returns remain tight.
Diversification of Energy Sources:
CERAWeek emphasized the importance of a balanced energy mix—including oil, gas, nuclear, and renewables—to meet rising global demand while ensuring energy security. The persistent reliance on gas power could spur the development of carbon capture.
Pragmatic Pathways to Net Zero:
Industry leaders are adopting region-specific approaches to decarbonisation that integrate renewables, energy storage, lower-carbon hydrocarbons and nuclear energy. In countries with no domestic fuel resources, the push for renewable based systems to provide strategic energy security will continue.
Balancing Security, Sustainability, and Affordability:
The classic energy trilemma remains central to capital allocation. Rising energy costs, geopolitical challenges, and decarbonisation pressures are driving investments in storage solutions, grid resilience, and diversified portfolios.
2. The Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI is emerging as both a challenge and an enabler in infrastructure development:
Complex Energy Demand Dynamics:
The rapid expansion of AI applications is driving significant increases in electricity demand. However, AI can also offer opportunities to enhance efficiency through grid optimisation, predictive maintenance, and demand response systems.
Digital Infrastructure:
The development and provision of data centres (“DC”), the hard infrastructure from which to service AI, is a growing hot topic across real assets conferences, with concerns voiced about the sustainability footprint, especially from the perspective of water consumption. In addition, the energy needed to power the data centres is proving challenging, with modular nuclear appearing to gain momentum as a potential option in the medium term.
Digital Market is fast evolving:
McKinsey estimates the DC market to grow from 59GW (2024) at an annual rate between 19 to 22% to 2030. However, fast technical evolution, recently illustrated by DeepSeek, and sectors such as private clouds and edge DCs require real asset investors to be attentive to sectors demand evolution. The Platform Conference in London (UK) heard from Google that the shape of AI and the eventual form of deployment has not been finalised by the hyperscalers and to expect change, while also monitoring regulation changes.
3. Sustainability and Decarbonisation in the Built Environment
Stakeholders are prioritising sustainability to address regulatory pressures, rising costs, and stakeholder expectations:
Building Decarbonisation as a Priority:
MIPIM 2025 underscored the urgent need for low-carbon buildings to meet financial and operational goals. Stricter regulations and surging energy costs are accelerating this shift. PropTech has zero’d in on creating integrated solutions like AI-powered property management platforms and smart building technologies.
City Competitiveness Through Urban Sustainability:
Global cities are adopting innovative strategies to address climate change challenges and resilience; Athens (large-scale greening initiatives to mitigate extreme heat), Cardiff (urban planning to manage flood risks) are examples.
Densification of cities continues to be a driving trend. Denver, the site of the annual National Planning Conference for the American Planning Association this year, is embracing European style densification of new residential development within walking and cycling distance of the city centre, attracting a younger population.
4. Preparing for Volatility and Enhancing Resilience
Resilience emerged as a critical theme across all conferences:
Prioritising Resilience Alongside Returns:
Climate risks, geopolitical shocks and “bad actors”, cyber threats, tariffs and shifting demand patterns are prompting investors to adopt adaptive business models. The recent Heathrow Airport transformer fire incident that disrupted flights for a few days served as a stark reminder of systemic vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure and the need for a more integrated planning and regulatory approach across multiple agencies.
Scenario Analysis and Stress Testing:
Leading investors are incorporating scenario analysis into governance strategies to evaluate asset performance under disruptive conditions such as extreme weather events or cyberattacks. This approach is becoming a differentiator in real assets management.
Conclusion
These insights underscore the dynamic nature of the built environment, energy, and digital sectors all undergoing significant transitions. They highlight the importance of adaptive business strategies that consider technological advancements, policy shifts, sustainability and resilience.
Whether it’s the operational vulnerabilities exposed at Heathrow airport, the growing power and water constraints facing data centres, or the complexities of scaling a national energy system, it's clear that no sector operates in isolation. Delivering robust, resilient assets requires coordinated thinking across digital, energy, transport, planning and regulatory ecosystems.

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