We are delighted at member feedback following our first U.S. Investor Dinner, held at the Bryant Park Grill in the heart of Manhattan. More than 70 investor members gathered for pre-dinner networking and a main event that featured a fireside chat with guest speakers Bayo Ogunlesi, founder, chairman and CEO of Global Infrastructure Partners, and a founding GIIA board member, and Christopher Frost, GIIA’s chairman since 2017 and senior managing director with Macquarie Asset Management.
The conversation ranged across the growth and future of the infrastructure asset class, alongside the birth and success over the last 10 years of GIIA itself, which has expanded from 19 founding organisations to nearly 140 members today. There was an overwhelming consensus that the economic, political, environmental and social pressures facing governments and communities mean a bright, long-term future for people working in our industry.
We’re extremely grateful for the support of Ferguson Partners for their partnership in what we hope will become an annual event, working alongside its business partner Curzon, which hosts the well-established UK Investor Dinner every year. Our thanks too to Kirkland & Ellis and McKinsey for their generous sponsorship, which brought so many investors together.
A busy schedule in New York continued with GIIA’s board meeting followed by a member reception at Macquarie’s New York offices, with a ‘double whammy’ of discussions on key issues in the US market. Macquairie’s managing director of government affairs, David Agnew led a straight-talking discussion with special guests Larry Hogan, former Governor of Maryland, and DJ Gribbin, a former advisor to President Trump, along with Gian-Carlo Peressutti of IFM Investors – all of them with years of immersion in the politics of infrastructure policy and investment.
The widespread community opposition in the US to data centers was a hot topic, with a blunt view that the industry has not presented its case well enough or engaged effectively at community level. Given the fundamental role of data centers in the 21st century, this needs to change if the benefits of these investments for all stakeholders are to be realised.
In a second conversation between David Quam, our U.S. senior adviser, and Craig Sundstrom, energy co-chair of the Data Center Coalition and a senior manager on public policy at Amazon Web Services, it was acknowledged that communities had valid concerns about environmental impact and energy affordability, but at the same time the growing need for data centers to power economies was inescapable.
Taken together, the two discussions made very clear that tackling the challenges facing data centers is now an urgent priority for the American tech industry, and GIIA will need to add its unique position as the voice of infrastructure investors to support the broader cause.