Brookfield Asset Management Ltd., one of the world’s largest alternative investment management firms, could become an unlikely rival to cloud infrastructure giants such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
A report in The Information yesterday suggests it’s planning to launch a cloud computing business that would lease artificial intelligence chips directly to customers. It would operate a business model that can lower the costs of building and running AI data centers, the report added.
The new business would be operated by a subsidiary of Brookfield called Radiant, and is linked to a new $100 billion AI infrastructure program that was announced in November. That program is anchored by Brookfield’s Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Fund, which has already committed $10 billion to the initiative, with half coming from a group of institutional and industry partners, including the chip giant Nvidia Corp. and the Kuwait Investment Authority.
The fund is backing new data center projects in France, Qatar and Sweden, and Radiant will reportedly be granted first call on the capacity of those new sites, an anonymous source told The Information. If that capacity is not taken up, Brookfield plans to rent it out to third-party cloud operators under a more traditional leasing structure.
The move follows the launch of a $20 billion joint venture between Brookfield and the Qatar Investment Authority that aims to invest in AI infrastructure in Qatar and other international markets.
Should Brookfield go ahead with its plans, the launch of Radiant could put it in direct competition with AWS and Microsoft Azure. The Information says it may have a distinct advantage over those rivals though, due to its multibillion-dollar investments in the global energy sector. It said these assets could allow it to control key elements of the AI value chain in a way that’s inaccessible to its pure-play cloud rivals.
With Amazon, Microsoft and others under growing pressure to show returns on their AI investments, the launch of Radiant could force them to come up with ways to optimize the energy logistics of their data center facilities to remain competitive.
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