Stonepeak Partnersis a global alternative investment firm specializing in infrastructure investment. Ryan Roberge, senior managing director of the firm’s credit investment team, took some time to talk to 9fin about the company’s strategy and approach as it looks to expand its credit business in Asia.
1. How would you introduce Stonepeak’s Asia strategy today, and how has your strategy evolved in the past few years?
Our strategy has evolved out of an interesting tension in the current environment. On the one hand, geopolitics and higher interest rates have made capital for infrastructure meaningfully more expensive in the region than it was maybe three to five years ago. On the other hand, demand for capital is significant in the sectors we focus on in Asia. These include energy, energy transition, digital infrastructure, transport and logistics, and social infrastructure. In some cases, like data centers, the demand for capital is unprecedented, and it’s fueled by powerful secular tailwinds.
The confluence of those drivers is creating a constructive environment for disciplined infrastructure investors. On the equity side, our strategy in Asia rests on four key tenets.
First, we’re creating assets and platforms from scratch by building infrastructure assets instead of just buying them in the market.
Second, we use structured, solutions-oriented capital. This gives us enhanced downside protection and offers us upside as we’re more of a capital provider than a controlling owner of a business.
Third, Stonepeak globally aims to drive value through hands-on operational improvement. That means partnering in-market with professionals we know well. We have teams on the ground in APAC to help with that. For example, we have a dedicated credit team in Australia led by Andrew Robertson.
Finally, we’re highly focused on portfolio construction strategies that are designed for downside protection and resiliency across currency and sovereign risks. We want to be thoughtful about balancing forex risk and using hedging strategies to protect against it. We also want to make sure we’re not taking outsized exposure to higher-risk jurisdictions.
On the credit side, we’re focusing on similar thematic approaches across the region but prioritizing opportunities secured by hard-asset infrastructure collateral and attractive LTV/LTC points. And we aim to preserve downside protection through security against infrastructure assets we know well. Finally, we’re bringing our structured capital solutions expertise to the market.
Ultimately, that means working with banks either on specific opportunities, where we provide different tranches of the capital structure to an infrastructure borrower, or working with banks directly on their large existing portfolios. We see a lot of opportunities to provide banks with structured capital solutions that can help them free up their balance sheet capacity.
2. An often-cited data point is that about 20% of lending in Asia is via private credit, with the remaining 80% coming from banks. How does Stonepeak navigate that smaller pool of targets to find the investments that make the most sense?
I'd say the private credit market for Asian infrastructure is very under-penetrated today and, while it’s traditionally been heavily dominated by banks, the amount of capital needed in the coming decades is changing that mix already.
With banks increasingly stretched on capacity, creative pathways are opening up for private credit to lend to borrowers either directly or, as I mentioned, alongside banks. The middle market is a great example where we see this. Sub-billion-dollar deals are where the banks are becoming stretched and may just have less appetite. That means borrowers, in turn, have a greater appetite for private credit as an alternative.
On the other side, we’ve increasingly found opportunities to partner with the banks on structured transactions like synthetic risk transfers or buying portions of their loan portfolios. This gives us the returns we're looking for without us being a ‘competitor’ to banks — we can be a holistic partner to them instead.
3. The rapid adoption of AI has led to massive investment in data centres globally. Stonepeak has been investing in data centers for some time — how does the firm view the outlook for data centers in Asia as a private credit target in 2026, or beyond?
I’d say it's an incredibly interesting opportunity, both on the equity and the debt side, to be providing capital to create this next-generation infrastructure.
For us, we’re really focusing on being led by large, investment-grade counterparties. The big Western hyperscalers and AI-centric companies have obviously focused more on their home markets first, but Asia is step two in their global expansion plans, and we want to be a financing partner in the equity and the debt stack for those.
So we want to focus really on the biggest companies with the best balance sheets that want us to provide capital to create infrastructure assets — very similar to how we've done in the US and Europe already. We like really solid contract counterparty support as opposed to being more leading-edge and looking for higher returns in things that could be seen as a bit more risky.
We also want to work in jurisdictions that are supportive of the investment, so we’re not looking at jurisdictions that come with issues like data sovereignty complications. Finally, we’re investing with partners and corporate offtakers that can provide credit support to give us the downside protection that we typically look for.
4. That same rush to fund data centres has led to some talk of over-exuberance. What is Stonepeak’s opinion on whether there’s too much activity in the sector?
I think any type of generational capital opportunity, where the numbers we're talking about are as big as they are, can raise some concerns about whether we’re moving too fast. But I think we take an appropriate level of skepticism globally — it's not specific to Asia when we think about that.
How we deal with that is what I call a narrowing of the fairway when it comes to the types of data centre opportunities we look for. We want to be in or close to tier-one markets. We want to be close to the eyeballs and close to the actual workloads.
What we’re not keen on is going for data centre deals that offer super cheap access to land and power now, but which are physically stranded from a demand perspective. In those deals, it’s much harder to answer the question of whether that data centre truly has a 30- or 50-year useful life. Another preference is to avoid building infrastructure for single-purpose use.
What we do like is the kind of data centre that can be converted to regular public cloud usage as opposed to high-density AI-centric workloads, so we can have assets that we think will truly have very long, useful lives in a host of different application scenarios.
5. Stonepeak is fundamentally an infrastructure investment fund. How do infra fund practices differ from regular private credit funds, and likewise how do these differ again in Asia versus the US?
I would say at a high level, infrastructure credit is much more of an asset-based approach to lending than regular private credit, which is much more of a cash flow forecast-based approach to lending.
For us, we're highly focused on collateral security against assets we know very, very well. The questions we ask ourselves when we're making a middle market infrastructure loan are “would we own this set of assets and this set of collateral through our loan on an unlevered basis if we ever had to?” Do we like the creation value of the assets through the debt? In a downside scenario, do we think we're always covered? Either because we could run the asset ourselves for cash flow and sweep ourselves back, or because we could sell this asset to a long list of buyers who would happily buy it?
In a lot of asset-light, services- or people-oriented businesses, you don’t really have true hard asset collateral that secures your loan. So it's a very different analysis to provide yourself with downside protection on the value of those businesses.
Regarding geographies, I don't think there's a big difference in our underwriting style in the US versus Asia, though there are nuances in Asia associated with currency or jurisdictional risk. You need to have a deep understanding of bankruptcy fundamentals and credit law in these specific jurisdictions. That's probably the biggest difference from the US, where you have bankruptcy courts that are highly understood by most lenders, versus going into specific different geographies in Asia and making sure you're comfortable with the legal frameworks in which you’re building credit structures.
6. How would you describe the differences in purpose and nature of private credit in Asia versus say the US? What are the challenges and opportunities that arise from those differences?
The biggest difference at a high level is just how well established the quote-unquote middle market is in the US versus Asia.
When you think about infrastructure in Asia, it often comes from very large corporates and very large governments. So you're talking about counterparties that are comprehensive, sophisticated, and have access to a very deep bank market.
On the other hand, the middle market part of infrastructure — say, the $500m to $2bn-sized firms — is still growing. That presents an opportunity for us to use our entrenched relationships with asset developers and infrastructure investors.
The other nuance is that in Asia, partnering with banks offers us a much more active pipeline of opportunities than it does in the US. Asian banks have very large portfolios of legacy infrastructure loans and assets, so when they want to invest in future infrastructure development, they're going to have to work with sophisticated investors to move some of that older capacity off their books.
We feel like we're in a very, very good position to be a trusted partner across the region for banks looking to do that. And I think that means you'll see some interesting structured transactions and deal flows from us in the region that the US market may not necessarily need.
7. What are some broader trends in the Asia market driving the need for private infrastructure credit?
In some of the more developing markets in Asia we still see urbanization and rising incomes driving demand for more infrastructure in and around cities.
I think a lot of people in the US don't know how big some of these cities and these metropolitan areas are, and how people in Asia live differently. A lot of cities don't have the same suburban dynamics we see in the US, Europe, or Canada, for example, and are instead a lot more centered around apartment living.
Rising incomes are creating consumers in Asia that have more disposable cash too, which leads to spending on improvements to quality of life. All those improvements require energy, creating huge tailwinds in the sector.
8. What are some risks specific to Asia that lenders like Stonepeak are focused on, which may differ from opportunities in say the US or Europe?
The two biggest risks are also the most obvious: currency risk and jurisdictional risk.
The first thing you'll see in an Asia credit portfolio is loans made to companies in many different jurisdictions. Investors usually contribute in dollars but the loans are being made in a host of different currencies.
On jurisdictional law, we make sure we’re focused on opportunities where we have a very, very good sense of how creditors have been treated in bankruptcy or distress situations historically.
The law for secured creditors in Malaysia is different from that in Japan, which is different again from that in Indonesia, and so on. That means a lot more work needs to go into crafting credit agreements, doing the legal diligence on these companies, and then ultimately getting comfortable that if you ever had to go foreclose on a loan made, there's a clear pathway to be able to do that.
There's a host of ways within corporate structures and credit agreements that you can preserve that downside protection. But the end goal is to be able to confidently tell investors that you have security against good collateral, even if it’s a jurisdiction they may not be very familiar with themselves.
9. How often are you in Asia, and can you tell us something about your favorite places to visit?
I've had the fortunate opportunity to go to the region several times in the last few years to fundraise. Most of my time is spent in Seoul, which I love. It's an incredibly vibrant city.
I was personally a bit shocked at just how big cities like Seoul and Tokyo really are once you get there. The busy-ness of Manhattan is one thing but it goes on forever in some larger cities in Asia.
But of course I have to speak to the food. It’s incredible. Korean barbecue or sushi in Tokyo. Meals with investors are always a highlight.
