As Martin points out, assets under management in private infrastructure have grown by more than 15% annually over the past decade, to around USD 1.6 trillion. The nature of the exposure has changed with it. Infrastructure is no longer limited to individual mature assets such as toll roads, bridges or wind farms, but increasingly comprises scalable operating platforms – data centers and fiber networks, battery energy storage businesses, or smart metering companies, among many others.

This creates a timing problem from which secondary buyers can benefit. A platform may have delivered on its original plan while valuable growth still lies ahead, precisely as the fund that owns it nears the end of its life. A conventional sale would hand that upside to a new owner. In a GP-led secondary, the manager instead moves the platform into a new vehicle: existing investors can take liquidity, new investors fund the next growth phase, and the manager continues building a business it knows intimately. Infrastructure secondary volumes have risen from less than USD 3 billion in 2020 to about USD 20 billion in 2025.

Martin argues that the decisive advantage lies in what an incoming investor may already know. Investors who participated in the original fund have access to performance data over many years and may understand it in detail – an advantage that matters most because the real task here is underwriting not only the existing cash flows, but above all the future growth.

Read the article in German in the below PDF or here.