“It’s clear to us that the world is short compute right now, and the industry is racing to catch up,” Rob Bittencourt, partner and head of thematic investing at Apollo, tells Bloomberg Intelligence’s Alexandra Davidov and Paul Gulberg on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast. Bittencourt discusses why AI is becoming a private-credit story, with trillions of dollars of data-center, power, chip and infrastructure investment needed to support the next phase of adoption. He also explains how Apollo underwrites AI infrastructure risk, why hyperscaler demand and investment-grade financing matter, and how investors should separate temporary software valuation resets from true business-model disruption.

Apollo on Funding AI Infrastructure

Tech Disruptors

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Tech Disruptors

## Participants

- **Anurag Rana** (Bloomberg Intelligence)
- **Paul Goldberg** (Bloomberg Intelligence)
- **Rob Bittencourt** (Apollo)
- **Rob Bittencourt** (Apollo)

## Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Bloomberg Intelligence Tech Disruptors podcast. I'm Anurag Rana, Associate Director of Research for Global Industries at Bloomberg Intelligence. With me here today from BI is Paul Goldberg. Paul is a DOR and Senior Analyst covering financials. I'm pleased to welcome Rob Bittencourt to our podcast. Rob is a partner and head of thematic investing at Apollo. He has spent his whole career in finance and has been with Apollo since 2006.

He has held senior leadership roles including co-head of opportunistic credit and head of research for global corporate credit. With research experience spanning technology, media and telecom and consumer. That background gives him a unique lens on the AI cycle as it expands across industries from software into infrastructure, data centers, power, financing capacity and the way private markets underwrite technological disruption. Welcome to the podcast Rob. Thanks for inviting me. We have a lot of ground to cover so let's dive right in.

Apollo has framed the current environment as part of a broader global industrial renaissance, not simply in the AI cycle. What do you think markets still misunderstand about the scale, duration and economic significance of the capital required to support this transition? Yeah, absolutely. So before I answer that question, maybe just to level set. So I run Apollo thematic investing. This is a relatively new group at Apollo that we stood up late last year.

And really the impetus for creating this group was a recognition by the firm that as you survey the markets over, and it's not just past two or three years, you go back to sort of the post-GFC period. Our perspective is that clearly markets are being more thematically driven than they ever have been before, more fast moving and dynamic than they ever have been before. There's a lot of technological nuance now that, you know, arguably didn't exist before.

And we made the decision to centralize a team, which now is about 12 professionals, to really focus on the big themes, understand them intimately, and then integrate those findings and those perspectives into how we underwrite, originate, and risk manage across the firm, across our credit business, our hybrid business, and our equity business.

So AI and some of the themes we're going to talk about today have been front and center in terms of where we've been spending our time. But yeah, I think the build out, this global industrial renaissance as we fashion it really has been in motion even before ChatGPT came on the scene in 2022.

If you think about the push towards diversifying our energy base, for example, through renewables and other forms of energy, or energy security through the build out of LNG export facilities here in t...

Apollo on Funding AI Infrastructure

Transcript

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Apollo on Funding AI Infrastructure

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.