Asset owners want infrastructure, and the cash to walk away

Infrastructure has now topped Marsh's Global Asset Owner Barometer in each of the three editions the firm cites—2023, 2025, and 2026—and the 430 asset owners behind the latest one, holding $5.76 trillion in combined assets, are not being coy about it: 50.7% intend to raise infrastructure exposure, for a net allocation intention of +42.3% that is the strongest the survey recorded for any asset class. Emerging market equities drew 46.9% intending to add, for net intentions of +33.5%.

The same respondents undercut the headline with their cash line: cash swung from net negative territory to a +22.0% net allocation intention, a 35.5 percentage-point move, while inflation-linked assets produced the second-largest net swing at +35.2%, up 24.4 points from 2025. Niall O'Sullivan, Marsh's global chief investment officer for investments and retirement, said "Capital is on the move in pursuit of true diversification, inflation protection, and flexibility," and flexibility is the word the private wealth industry ought to pause on.

Taken together, the responses form a barbell: long-duration real assets on one side, unpriced optionality on the other. The survey's most concrete detail is a person rather than a percentage—a health foundation chief investment officer who described doubling infrastructure exposure ahead of the AI data-center build-out on the view that the US is "materially underinvested in infrastructure projects, specifically energy."

That is the trade in its cleanest form: a foundation with perpetual spending needs can hold a contracted power asset for the life of the contract, match duration to duration, and collect the inflation linkage Marsh keeps pointing to—linkage that becomes more valuable when monetary policy is unsettled. The same trade barely exists in the wrapper most clients will be offered.

The wealth channel is reading infrastructure's three-edition run at the top of the survey as a green light rather than as a queue, but 430 owners make up a sample of the largest allocators on earth, and their stated intentions are among the most reflexive data in the market: a survey showing that half the biggest balance sheets want the same asset is itself a reason that asset's price has moved. Marsh's own framing—a multi-year pattern that looks more durable than a cyclical trade—is fair, and it is also what three years of rising net intentions have already been paid for.

The advisor-facing version of the trade is already in motion: private infrastructure is gaining ground with financial advisors, with power, data centers and grids drawing the most interest, and advisors are rethinking allocations in the same direction as their institutional counterparts. From there the instinct is familiar—build the rail first—and this publication has argued that the private-markets gateway is overbuilt on the on-ramp while the operating layer beneath it is not, with real assets next in line for the same treatment. The wrapper sharpens the problem: the standing view on semi-liquid credit is that the liquidity promise is the first term to break when it is tested, and nothing in the Marsh data suggests toll roads and substations behave differently inside the same plumbing, though only a redemption cycle settles that question in either direction.

The interest concentrates in the three sectors advisors are being pointed toward—the ones whose cash flows lean hardest on long-term contracts with creditworthy counterparties, the attraction for an institution and the hardest thing for a liquid wrapper to manufacture at scale. Demand is real, but whether a sleeve bought at today's entry prices collects the same income stream the health foundation is underwriting is a separate matter, unconfirmed until the vintages season.

Access stopped being the scarce good the moment 50.7% of the largest owners said they wanted in, and an asset class that has topped the same survey in 2023, 2025 and 2026, with net intentions still climbing, has a marginal buyer who is buying momentum, and momentum buyers pay the people who arrived first. A fundraise can falsify this call within a year: the next cohort of advisor infrastructure products will compete on fee and structure rather than on allocation access, because the story that sells the allocation—the AI build-out, the energy shortfall—is available to every wholesaler in the market, and only the terms are proprietary.

Emerging market equities are the franker half of the barometer: Marsh credits the 30.8-point jump in net intentions, to +33.5%, to a reassessment of relative value and to a deliberate effort to cut developed-market concentration, and the second motive is doing most of the work. The allocation likely unwinds when US concentration does rather than when emerging market fundamentals improve—a perfectly good trade and a hard thing to sell, since an advisor who markets it as a valuation call owns an explanation they never sold when a currency moves.

The line to watch is cash. If the next barometer prints positive cash intentions alongside higher infrastructure and emerging market intentions, the capital is real and the queue is genuine; if cash slides back into net negative territory while the risk intentions hold, Marsh will have recorded a preference rather than a plan, and the sleeve will have recorded whatever its clients did instead. The health foundation that doubled was not, at bottom, buying an asset class; it was buying energy.