The good news for the U.S. economy and American workers is that there’s a massive capital investment boom driving economic growth and technology innovation. We all know about the boom in AI and data centers, but the need is deeper, broader and more consequential. Energy transition and utility expansion, infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing all require significant amounts of capital, and the private credit industry has done its fair shares to finance this next industrial revolution and America’s competitiveness.
The less good news is that this boom is so capital-intensive that we are all collectively realizing that no single market—public equities, public credit, or private credit—can finance it alone.
We believe that the most important financial story of the next decade is not the rise of private credit, but the return of this kind of capital intensity, which we haven’t seen in several decades. Every major era of economic expansion has demanded its own capital architecture, from railroads to fiber optics. The industrial buildout of the 20th century required enormous investment in physical assets, which needed long-duration pools of capital, including insurance balance sheets, designed to finance infrastructure at scale.
Since the 1990s, the world’s most successful companies grew on asset-light models. Software scaled faster than steel, and capital markets evolved around that reality. But that era is ending. The next phase of economic growth will be built not just on code, but on physical systems: chips, energy, logistics, factories, and the infrastructure to power them.
That shift is already putting pressure on traditional financing channels. Investment-grade (IG) issuance is hitting record highs as technology and industrial borrowers raise enormous sums to fund buildouts that would have seemed extraordinary only a few years ago. Oracle priced $25 billion in February and in April, Meta priced $25 billion. This year alone, Amazon issued $62 billion, marking the largest single-issuer year on record. IG net issuance now nearly matches U.S. Treasury net issuance levels, despite elevated federal deficits.
Hyperscaler capital expenditures alone are projected to reach staggering levels, but that’s one piece of the puzzle. Rebuilding America’s industrial base after decades of underinvestment will require trillions of dollars, from expanding power infrastructure to modernizing manufacturing and strengthening critical supply chains, all competing for the same pools of capital.
Equity markets are feeling similar pressure. Alphabet recently made its first equity issuance in two decades to help fund AI-related investment far exceeding what it raised when it first went public. Even the most cash-generative companies can no longer fund this buildout alone.
The old framings of public versus private, debt versus equity, no longer fit the moment. The real question is how to build a capital architecture capable of financing a more asset-heavy economy. Public bond markets, banks, insurance balance sheets, and private capital are not substitutes in that system. They are complements.
Private credit, which we see as a $40 trillion, largely investment-grade market, matters in that architecture not because it replaces public markets, but because it can provide duration, flexibility, and structural precision when borrowers are financing complex, long-lived assets. But this is not a case for indiscriminate growth. As more financing moves into customized private structures, investors and regulators will need to watch for opacity, concentration, and the temptation to confuse financial engineering with genuine economic productivity.
The point is not that one market wins. It is that America’s industrial renaissance will be financed the same way it is being built: through coordination across systems that were once treated as separate.
When that happens, America wins.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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