Asset management giant Brookfield is moving beyond just building the shells for data centers.
According to The Information, Brookfield is launching its own cloud business, Radiant, to lease AI chips directly to developers. This move signals a massive strategic pivot towards end-to-end control of the AI value chain.
🔌 THE VERTICAL INTEGRATION THESIS: Brookfield is creating a “moat” that pure-play cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google) cannot easily replicate:
- The Energy: They own the renewable power generation.
- The Real Estate: They own the physical data centers (projects active in France, Qatar, Sweden).
- The Compute (New): With Radiant, they now control the chips inside.
💰 CAPITAL & BACKING:
- The Fund: Radiant is tied to a new $10 billion AI fund (part of a broader $100 billion AI infrastructure program).
- The Partners: Anchored by heavyweights including Nvidia and the Kuwait Investment Authority.
- The Model: Radiant gets priority leasing rights on data centers developed under the fund, ensuring rapid deployment.
⚔️ COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE: This challenges the traditional hyperscaler model. While Amazon and Microsoft are facing scrutiny over capital efficiency and energy logistics, Brookfield’s integrated approach allows them to optimize energy and real estate costs internally, potentially offering a more streamlined solution for AI training clusters.
💡 ANALYST TAKEAWAY: Brookfield is effectively becoming a “Full-Stack Utility” for AI. By selling the electron, the square foot, and the FLOP (compute), they are capturing margin at every step of the AI lifecycle.
👇 Real Estate & Cloud Pros: Can an asset manager really compete with hyperscalers on cloud operations, or is this purely an infrastructure arbitrage play?