Apollo设立AI与数字基础设施覆盖角色以争取AI大型融资业务

Apollo and other big asset managers are trying to position themselves to capture more business from the large-scale financing needed to continue the AI infrastructure build-out. Some high-profile projects are too large for traditional corporate loans, spawning a web of partnerships, backstops and other arrangements to spread the risk among AI labs, chip and cloud firms, and lenders.

While Apollo is best known for investing clients’ money in private equity, credit and other funds it manages, it also has a capital solutions business that earns fees by assembling large deals and pulling in other investors and lenders. The firm still makes most of its money from managing investments and its insurance business, but arranging deals is a growing source of revenue, helping offset the weak profits it’s seen recently from selling its private equity investments.

The financing Apollo [arranged](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/inside-broadcoms-bold-move-boost-demand-chips) for Broadcom earlier this year will help Google deploy its custom AI chips with Anthropic as the customer using the compute capacity. In that deal, a special purpose vehicle will buy Google’s chips, which it developed with Broadcom, and lease them to Anthropic. Broadcom provided a backstop for the bulk of that debt. Apollo as well as rival Blackstone will keep some of the debt in funds they manage and sell the rest to other investors and lenders.

The development of the data centers the chips will go in is financed separately from the $35 billion chip deal, including through setups where Google [backstops the lease payments](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-using-wall-street-financing-techniques-expand-chip-sales) in a way that allows the developers to issue cheaper debt.

Apollo already has a broad team working on AI-specific deals, with about 60 people focused on digital infrastructure, one of the people said. Rayman is specifically focused on sourcing lending deals backed by semiconductors and their lease payments, the person said, as opposed to financing other aspects of AI infrastructure such as data centers, power or real estate.

Apollo oversees large pools of [insurance capital](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/insurance-money-latest-funding-source-ai-developers), including through its Athene arm. Financing backed by leases of chips, such as Google’s tensor processing units and Nvidia’s dominant AI chips, can be attractive to insurers. Insurers typically invest premiums in long-term debt with predictable payments so they can make payouts to policyholders down the line.

The deals that finance chips use the hardware as collateral and often feature corporate guarantees to ensure the end user pays its lease. Those protections help the debt secure investment-grade ratings while still offering higher yields than similarly rated corporate bonds.

Rayman describes the role on his partner profile page as “overseeing the firm’s global coverage of the AI and digital infrastructure ecosystem as part of a cross-firm effort to bring Apollo’s full range of capital solutions to leading technology companies.” It couldn’t be learned when exactly he took on the new AI role.

He reports to Chris Edson, Apollo’s global head of origination, the person said, who oversees finding, underwriting and funding new loans and investments. Rayman also reports to Jamshid Ehsani, who leads Apollo’s global principal structured finance business. Ehsani’s team arranges and invests in big loans backed by assets or contracts—such as data center or aircraft leases—across sectors.

The new role for Rayman builds on recent moves by Apollo to expand its work on large financings for capital-intensive businesses. In December, Apollo separated its hybrid business from its traditional private equity business, making it into a stand-alone unit overseen by partner Matt Nord with Rayman as deputy co-head, the Financial Times [reported](https://www.ft.com/content/9a34679e-8dff-425b-aef1-b709ac6230bc?syn-25a6b1a6=1). The hybrid business makes big investments combining debt and equity.

Ahead of Apollo formalizing the hybrid unit as a stand-alone business, Rayman helped [launch](https://ir.apollo.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/586/apollo-and-8vc-partner-to-accelerate-the-next-wave-of) a multibillion-dollar partnership with Joe Lonsdale’s venture firm, 8VC, to identify tech companies with capital-intensive projects seeking larger financings than typical venture rounds. Before moving into hybrid investing, Rayman focused on private equity deals and led the firm’s $5 billion buyout in 2021 of Verizon’s media business, which included Yahoo and AOL.

Blackstone has taken its own cross-team approach to some of its AI investing. The firm announced in April that Jas Khaira would lead a newly created group called Blackstone N1, which inherited Blackstone’s [growth equity business](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/blackstones-spanx-and-supergoop-bets-are-stuck-in-low-gear) and coordinates AI investments across other parts of the firm. Khaira, who also heads the tactical opportunities strategy in the Americas, led Blackstone’s early financing of CoreWeave.

**‘Unprecedented’ Buildout**

Apollo has already been active in financing chips or related assets. In 2024, Apollo led an $11 billion investment to acquire a 49% stake in an Intel semiconductor manufacturing facility in Ireland. Earlier this year, it helped pair a $3.5 billion financing with a $1.9 billion Nvidia commitment to enable a unit of Valor Equity Partners to buy chips and lease them to xAI.

The firm has been active in other areas of AI  infrastructure besides chip-focused deals. Apollo majority-owns Stream Data Centers alongside minority owner and insurer Principal Financial Group, and recently bought a European colocation business from Blue Owl–owned Stack Infrastructure, though its exposure to data center assets is smaller than some rivals’.

Apollo President Jim Zelter highlighted the opportunity for the company to play a growing role in the AI build-out on the firm’s second-quarter earnings call Tuesday.

“The sheer size of the AI infrastructure build-out is unprecedented,” Zelter said. “We see ourselves playing a critical role in partnering with the leading firms and providing these flexible scaled solutions to support their needs.”

Across all industries, Apollo’s capital solutions business has originated more than $130 billion across 190 transactions, largely over the last two years. Apollo said its fees from arranging and financing deals jumped 28% from the year-ago period, to a record $277 million, more than a third of the firm’s total fee-related earnings. That’s not yet reflecting fees from the Broadcom deal, which Apollo expects to recognize as the funds are drawn, mostly later this year and in the first three quarters of 2027.

Apollo’s assets under management meanwhile climbed to $1.05 trillion as of the end of the second quarter, though realized performance fees dropped 41% as the firm held off on some private equity exits.