“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

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...

Apollo on Funding AI Infrastructure

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

Apollo on Funding AI Infrastructure

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.