The New Drivers of Infrastructure Performance

Private infrastructure has delivered consistently strong investment performance through past market cycles, with an annualized total return of 11.7% since June 2008 and only one quarter of negative returns since the 2008 global financial crisis, according to the expanded dataset of the MSCI Global Quarterly Private Infrastructure Asset Index.  

But beneath this relative stability, the contributions from the various underlying sectors have shifted meaningfully over time. Both returns and capital allocations across sectors have evolved, changing each sector’s contribution to the index’s absolute total return. Airports and transport assets — averaging 47% of the index by value from 2008 to 2019 — declined in influence to average 26% of the index’s capital value from the start of 2020 to mid-2025. The COVID-19 pandemic acted as an accelerant, exposing the vulnerability of demand-linked sectors and reshaping long-term capital flows. 

In the place of airports and transport assets, the new pillars of performance have been renewable energy, power transmission and communication infrastructure. These sectors have benefited from policy momentum, decarbonization commitments and surging demand for digital connectivity. Together, they now account for a significantly higher share of both total return and invested capital than before the pandemic, and as a result account for a larger share of the weighted contribution to the index’s total return. 

For investors, these shifts highlight the growing importance of understanding the underlying drivers of infrastructure performance. The sector’s evolution — from transport to energy and digital systems — points to a more complex and diverse opportunity set. As capital continues to align with the energy transition and digitalization, portfolio resilience may depend increasingly on balancing exposure across both traditional and emerging segments and choosing the right assets within these segments.