By Hrishikesh Potey, Siongkoon Lim and Martin Weissbart

Despite another challenging year for infrastructure investment in 2024 and a relatively soft start to 2025, investors remain cautiously optimistic about a recovery. After a resilient 2022 and a sharp decline in deal activity in 2023, expectations were high for a rebound in 2024. However, persistent financing challenges led to further declines in both deal count and size - unlike the rebound seen in private equity buyouts during the same period.

Although the deal market remained challenging, the wave of consolidation that started in 2022 continued into 2024, including Blackrock’s acquisition of GIP, General Atlantic’s acquisition of Actis; and CVC’s acquisition of DIF. Looking ahead, ever-increasing need for capital to develop long-term sustainable infrastructure means the outlook for infrastructure deals is positive.

Thematic investments in energy transition, transportation decarbonization , and circular economy are set to continue, alongside greater focus on core+ and value-add hybrid infrastructure assets. In this report, we start at a macro level, dissecting the broader investment and fundraising trends, before moving to sector-level analyzis, where we address key frontier topics by sector.

Infrastructure M&A development and fundraising

Marco headwinds that started blowing in 2022 and picked up speed in 2023 failed to subside in 2024, further impacting infrastructure M&A activity. In 2024, global infrastructure M&A deal count declined 8% year-over-year (y-o-y), while the average deal size dropped 14%. This further decline in 2024 contrasts with what most respondents in our Infrastructure Investment Outlook 2024 survey expected, where 60% of respondents expected a slight to moderate deal count increase in 2024. Low fundraising levels and a worsening macroeconomic situation (in particular, spiking interest rates and geopolitical uncertainties) were the primary reasons.

While the slowdown had a marked impact on infrastructure fundraising in 2023 (which halved from its 2022 peak of USD 154 bn), fundraising levels in fact increased by 14% y-o-y in 2024. Though fundraising for the core+ and opportunistic strategies, declined, this was more than offset by growth in the core and value add strategies where fundraising increased by 2.5x and 3.5x y-o-y, respectively.

Current sentiment and outlook for 2025

To gauge investors’ expectations for infrastructure investments in 2025, we surveyed experienced investment bankers and fund managers. 86% of respondents expect growth in the infrastructure deal count in 2025, up from 77% in 2024. While overall sentiment is stronger relative to our 2024 survey, respondents’ expectations are less bullish, with 81% expecting deal count to grow slightly or moderately (vs. 60% in 2024) and only 5% expecting it to grow strongly (vs. 14% in 2024). The positive outlook holds across all deal sizes but is least optimistic for larger deals.

Respondents expect deal counts to grow across all regions, with particularly strong sentiment in Europe and North America, where 78% and 79% anticipate growth, respectively. Expectations point to slight-to-moderate growth in Europe and Asia-Pacific—though a quarter foresee Asia-Pacific remaining flat—while North America shows the highest conviction, with 18% expecting growth of at least 10%. Sector sentiment varies, with more optimism for transportation, energy , and hybrid infrastructure than for utilities and digital and social Infrastructure.

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