Transcription
Joining me from Milken now, first on CNBC, Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt. It's great to see you here. Good morning, Sara. Good morning.
You know, we're we're following all the headlines from the Middle East this morning and whether the ceasefire is on or off. And I did want to ask you because I think the last time we spoke we were in Riyadh together and you've been a big investor in the Gulf and Qatar and UAE and Saudi. Is a war changing the way you think about that region?
No, short answer, no. Not doing anything differently. No. No, in fact, doubling down. We're doing more. It's always when you find great businesses, great countries, great people and the market offers you an opportunity to invest when others are not, it's always the best opportunities in the world. So, we're doing more. We've been there 25 years. We're continuing to do all the investments that we have there and we're going to do more and they're going to they will eventually build better countries because of this.
I was going to say, does the war make you more optimistic about the long-term viability?
First, everyone gets more focused on the task at hand. And they're going to build resiliency in all their systems. They're going to build their own AI. They're going to build their own pipelines to the coast. They're going to do things they didn't do before. They have to do it. They probably should have, but they're going to now. And they're going to be more resilient. And these countries are past the point of They're all hugely successful. And this is just along the road of that trail.
To have to figure out how to maybe secure data centers, cuz I know you're actively building a Qatari data center. I mean, that was targeted in this war.
Yes, look, again, when you say everyone in these periods of time, everyone learns things that they never thought about before or didn't think would happen and you change. And so you get better for it. It's like everything and these are great countries and great people. So, we're going to keep investing there and probably do more.
So, Brookfield does so much around the world, in infrastructure and private equity and credit and real estate, but you have gone big on building out the AI revolution, right? Data funding data centers and the power that is needed to generate compute.
Sara, we got lucky and we've been in the power business forever. We've been in the real estate business forever. And we started in data centers 10 years ago. And those three things allow us to have a unique set of skills to offer to be able to build AI factories, data centers, compute for the large hyperscalers and countries around the world that need the infrastructure. Remember what's happening today is we're just building the utility systems, the railways, the roads of the economy, the new economy, the next economy. And we're going to do it in 10 years. And things that took 50 years before, it's going to get built in 10. And this is 6, 7, 10 trillion dollars. And there's a massive buildout of infrastructure going on led by the major, most profitable countries, companies in the world and hyperscalers and countries.
So, but why are you so confident, Bruce, that this bet will pay off? Because there are questions, right, about it's a lot of money going behind it.
I'm not We don't invest in the models generally. That's not our business. I'm very confident that artificial intelligence has been changing the world for 25 years. It's just now because of cloud and because of compute capacity that everyone's now utilizing it and you can see the future of what's coming. Everyone's going to be using it. It gets embedded in your life. You don't even know it's happening. When you get to the airport, it looks at your face and lets you on the plane. You didn't know, but AI did that. And that's it's just embedding into your life and this is the utilities of the future. So, it is going to work. The profitability of each specific one can be questioned at points in time. So, I'm not saying which one, but artificial intelligence itself and what we're doing is building the backbone behind that. So, we're building power. We're building data centers. We're building these large factories. And this is large-scale infrastructure and it's just an extension of everything we've been doing for 25 years.
What's the biggest constraint that you have right now in doing it?
The constraint is just building. This is not easy to do. When you're building, you need 50, 100, 250 billion dollars per center. You need the power to fuel it. You need the buildings. You need the chips. You need the servers. You need everything that goes inside the buildings. It's complicated. And it's getting workers. It's getting people. It's not really money. The money's there for the returns. It's putting together the logistics and the people to be able to do it, which is why we have an advantage. We've been doing it a long time. And that gives us an advantage versus most.
Going to be building them in space, too? Are you involved with that?
Eventually that will happen because it makes more sense.
Solar power, right?
Instead of bringing power back to bring um to bring compute back. So, it makes sense. It's just going to be a while.
You're not there yet.
No.
What can you tell us a little bit about what Deploy Co is? This is a venture that private equity firms, including Brookfield, believe are doing with OpenAI where you're both investing and then your portfolio companies use their product.
What this is is what we're generally doing is building the backbone infrastructure and that's where most of our money is going. But in our private equity businesses, we have an enormous number of businesses that need to utilize artificial intelligence. And what OpenAI did was set up a subsidiary. We invested into it with a bunch of others. And this business will facilitate industrial companies like ourselves to be able to deploy artificial intelligence into their businesses. So, when we go to a company and we buy a company or the companies we have, our playbook is we have to make the businesses better. And before we did that with re-aligning systems of manufacturing and all the things we did. Today a lot of it's about artificial intelligence and we're going to get early access to models. We're going to get people from OpenAI. We're going to get a relationship to be able to build the business better and it just gives us an advantage versus others again because of our scale.
Okay, so final question, because of your scale and because you're in so many different businesses, real estate, retail, I'm curious what the Bruce Flatt view is right now about the US economy, questions about whether we're going to have lasting inflation again and just how durable this decent growth picture is.
We've had We probably would have had a slower economy except for what's getting invested into artificial intelligence and therefore that's adding percentage points to GDP. And that's going to last for a long time and this is not stopping for 10 years. So, I see a very
Investment?
Yes. This 10 years we're going to be investing into artificial intelligence across the board in large sums. And that's going to add to the economy for a long time and to GDP. So, the US is very constructive today. We see that in our businesses. And I'd say globally it's constructive. But there's never You know, there's always soft spots around the world and in businesses you have.
Okay, well, Bruce, it's good to get your view on everything. I know you're at the center of a lot of the deals here. You're a popular man at Milken. So, thank you for spending some time.
Thank you for having me. Bruce Flatt, the CEO of Brookfield.