Tom van Rijsewijk, head of infrastructure and investment grade private credit EMEA at Macquarie Asset Management, has built a career out of turning debt into tangible assets. He believes infrastructure credit is experiencing a golden age.
This week, Macquarie provided a €350m facility to CVE, a French renewable energy producer. The company’s portfolio has the potential to generate one gigawatt of power, of which 750 megawatts is already operational, according to Rijsewijk.
The financing, which will support the build-out and continued growth of the business, is part of Macquarie’s push into infrastructure debt. In July 2025, the asset manager closed its first dedicated European infrastructure debt fund at €1.2bn, alongside €2.3bn raised through separately managed accounts.
Undeniably, infrastructure lending is on the rise. Global infrastructure finance deal value rose 18% year-over-year to roughly $1.3trn in the first half of 2026, despite the number of transactions falling 8.9% to 2,200, according to Green Street research.
9fin caught up with Rijsewijk to discuss the CVE deal, the hotspots within European infrastructure lending, and the risks of a growing market.
1. Congratulations, you’ve just provided a €350m facility to CVE, what can you tell us about this deal?
CVE is a solar business that is headquartered in France and invests in solar across France, Chile, and the US. It’s quite a mature platform.
There were three things that really attracted us to this deal. First, there's a lot of demand for power and decarbonisation, so developers or operators such as CVE benefit from that macro environment. Then we looked at the management team — CVE’s is very strong. And third, we were able to create a really good, bilateral structure which makes sense for us and for CVE.
The financing will allow CVE to keep constructing and building out its solar pipeline. This is about growing the asset base and getting solar farms built. We brought our LPs into the transaction so they get exposure to a sector we think is genuinely interesting.
2. CVE’s financing sits at the platform level rather than against individual assets. What’s the rationale behind that kind of deal and is it becoming more common?
It is absolutely becoming more common, and that is because the platforms themselves are becoming more mature. The amount of renewable capacity installed each year is still growing, and all of it requires financing. The opportunity is very large.
Whether a business is in solar, wind, or other renewables, it will have assets in development, assets under construction, and assets in operation. Operating and constructing assets carry a modest level of project financing, but the capital required to keep a platform growing is enormous. That is what makes an additional layer of financing at the corporate level sensible. For us, it’s a great opportunity.
3. Does this maturing market mean there’s more convergence between classic corporate direct lending and infrastructure lending?
That's a really good observation. I started my career in project finance, where the model was to take a single project and finance it. What you see now is something with true underlying infrastructure characteristics that nonetheless resembles corporate lending. That raises the question of what still makes it infrastructure.
We believe that infrastructure is defined by three things. It must be an essential asset providing power or communication, for instance. It must have high barriers to entry; in CVE’s case the capital requirement is substantial and not everybody can build out solar power. And it must be a high-margin business at a very low cost, which is what makes the cashflows so durable.
What used to be project financing has grown into something much closer to recognisable private credit. It is effectively a corporate, but a very specific corporate in a very specific sector, with very strict characteristics.
4. What does this deal tell us about the state of European infrastructure debt? Is solar where the smart money is?
Of course we like to think we're smart money, but it’s not so much about the sector specifically. There are many interesting sectors, including this, but also data centres, fibre, and more.
CVE ticks a lot of boxes for us. It is part of the push to decarbonise power, and it can supply power for the digital infrastructure boom. Those are two things Europe needs, and CVE does both very economically.
We always want the right management teams, the right track records, and the right structure. CVE has all three, and this piece of the capital structure suits us particularly well. I believe that well-structured debt is a win-win for everybody.
5. You mentioned data centres, which are a hot topic right now. Since most are being built in the US, how does Europe’s story differ from America’s?
There are several different types of data centre. There are cloud data centres, which we use for the cloud but also for running Zoom or Teams calls. A UK Zoom call will not go through a cloud data centre in Virginia, because the delay on the line would be too great. It runs through local data centres instead, and Europe does that as well as anywhere.
Then there are AI training data centres. Not much of that happens in Europe; it is predominantly a US and China activity. Even at a smaller scale, you would probably site it where power is cheap. Europe is not losing entirely here, but there are not as many.
Then there are inference data centres. You send something to your AI model and you get something back; that’s its whole job. That is done locally too, and these can be attractive investments.
From our perspective it always comes back to whether we consider something infrastructure. It is the same three questions every time: is it an essential asset with high barriers to entry and durable cash flows? If the answers are yes, we may be able to invest.
CVE benefits indirectly from the AI boom, because that boom needs power and power prices will rise. That is where we see the play, because that’s where the infrastructure is.
6. Many worry about a data centre bubble, where do you sit on that and how do you account for risk?
That is the impossible question. Plenty of people are worried about a bubble and I can see why. The question we can actually answer is what happens to our returns if it bursts.
If it does, we want to be as well protected as possible. That starts with the right underlying assets, then the right structures placed on top of them, then diversification. Together, those things deliver real downside protection while still producing attractive returns.
If the assets are genuinely good and genuinely infrastructure, credit markets often continue to finance them even after a bubble bursts. Equity markets may get less excited, but credit endures. Financing tends to continue for infrastructure that is necessary, and data centres are exactly that.
If there is a bubble and credit keeps flowing, that is probably where we’ll find long-term success.
7. What risks in European infrastructure lending keep you up at night?
For the market as a whole, credits are still structured sensibly in terms of leverage. The lessons people learned in 2009 still apply. Pricing is at the tighter end of the pendulum swing, but that holds across every asset class, and I do not think it is the sort of thing people look back on in five years' time with regret. We know which deals to do and which to leave.
Infrastructure debt is growing, but it does not feel like an enormous flood of new entrants doing irrational things, or things they should not be doing at all. That is good news for everybody.
It comes down to making sure that when you invest in something as an infrastructure asset, it really is infrastructure. That is what went wrong in 2007/2008, when assets that were quasi-infrastructure rather than core were levered incorrectly. It is a risk we watch closely. Overall, I am not seeing much that I really do not like.
8. If an infrastructure deal goes bad, what does a workout process look like and how does it differ from corporate direct lending?
A workout in infrastructure is not fundamentally different in nature, but it does have some specific characteristics. Infrastructure is still a little heavier on covenants, and the assets are typically more stable. When things go wrong they go wrong more slowly, which is helpful.
Set against that, the asset class has less muscle memory and less experience of restructuring than corporate lending does. The risk is that people are too relaxed about things.
There are some examples of infrastructure workouts, with Thames Water among them, and we are learning a lot from it. The negotiation is often about resetting terms, but it can also be about an exit, and that is where difficulties can arise. You might be in the middle of a buildout and you have to ask whether to keep putting money in, and how to run the asset well in the meantime. The assets are high quality, but the exit timing may be poor.
That is something we think about carefully, and it is a little different in infrastructure than in corporate lending.
9. You said you love infrastructure debt because it makes something real. Is there an asset you worked on that you revisit?
Physically visiting my assets is not something I get to do often, unfortunately. But we did a London fibre deal a while back that I still think about.
Fibre has faced more headwinds than most sectors, particularly in the UK, and this business has done well regardless. But what I really enjoy is the people who work on these projects. They combine engineering experience with all kinds of other disciplines, all of which are fascinating. For my part, I believe financing is what keeps the wheels turning, and that’s how I can contribute. But I love getting technical with people and learning from what they know.
