Good afternoon. I'm Patrick Davitt, the U.S. Asset Manager Analyst here at Autonomous. It's my pleasure to welcome Blue Owl's Co-CEO, Marc Lipschultz, to the stage. I think it's Blue Owl's first time here, so thanks a lot for coming, Marc.
Thank you for having us. It's a privilege.
As a reminder, if you want to try to get your own questions in, you can submit them through the Pigeonhole app, and they'll come up on my iPad, and I'll try to work them in as they fit. Marc, thanks again. Given we have most of the major alts here at the conference, I'm starting all the conversations with similar high-level macro questions. Given your position as one of the largest credit managers in the U.S., I think it's best to start there. I sense there's, despite the market recovery, increasing concern about stickier inflation, higher-for-longer rates, slowing economic growth, and what that means for risk assets. What's your latest thinking on those issues, and do you agree with the concern that a lot of people have?
We're in the concern business, right? Everything we do, credit included, is about downside protection, stability, predictability, income orientation. Our whole reason to be, and from inception today and from today till the next decade ahead, I think our products will always be centered on, hey, look, what can go wrong, and how do we deliver a strong result even if things are a couple standard deviations away from the mean or the expectation? We've actually long had the view, and I don't mean this as a macro view because we're not macro investors, but long had the maybe informed view based on having 400 companies that we lend to here in the U.S. that inflation was likely to be considerably stickier than people thought. Now, today, that's become obvious now 18 months later.
Sitting here today, we have a new wave of it, the question, the uncertainty around stimulative fiscal policy and impacts of tariffs, all of which lead to a continuing overhang on this question. I guess I'll say this in plain form, and then we can unpack it. That's a good environment for us. I mean, to be perfectly candid, the environment where rates are higher for longer, the economy has some uncertainty to it, which tends to drive market uncertainty, therefore access to traditional markets are a little less clear, certainly less safe for people to count on. That all is good. For our investors, this is exactly, I'll use the term purpose-built.
This is what we're purpose-built for, an environment where people aren't unidirectional or don't want to be unidirectional in their view and say, how do I make a really good risk-adjusted return through a range of outcomes? That's why we exist. That's what our firm is built for. Frankly, it's what our equity is built for. Our equity at Blue Owl is built entirely on fee-based income. It's based on permanent capital. It's based on balance sheet life, no CapEx, high gross margin. It's built to itself be highly durable through a wide range of outcomes.
It sounds like no, but are you seeing any signs of the stress or contraction that people are worrying about in the portfolio at this point?
No, not material. Again, we neither want to be ostriches with our heads in the sand, but we also do not want to be running around with our hair on fire. The facts are important for us. We are studying all the companies. Again, we have a very specific lens. We are primarily U.S. in our deployment. You can call that wise design or not, as you wish, but of our $275 billion, 90% is deployed here in the U.S. We deploy our, say, credit, to your point, we deploy with large companies, with large sponsors. We focus on businesses like software and healthcare services and things that are indeed durable to those types of forces. We are not unaware that there are a lot of companies struggling with the impacts of real-time global supply chains. We just do not lend to them. It is just not our issue.
From the bottom up, from a Blue Owl point of view, we share that that concern and risk exists in the economy. We're not experiencing it and don't anticipate from what we see today experiencing anything material on the portfolio in the near term.
Deployment is particularly relevant for private credit firms because a lot of the AUM turns on as deployed. There has been this kind of tug-of-war debate between the broadly syndicated market and the direct lending market, which has been a little bit more volatile this year. It still feels like direct lending is taking share. With BSL, the broadly syndicated market coming back in May, though there have still been some big deal wins in the last few weeks. How is that balance tracking now? How are you guys thinking about that balance? Through that lens, how has the pipeline tracked since we last heard from you on the earnings call?
The interplay between the syndicated loan market and the direct loan market is, I do not want to say it is nuanced, but I think we just unpack at one level. Of course, there is just the foundational, hey, someone's financing, they could pick one market or the other. What is really critical about our business, and this, again, is sort of the origin, not just story, but sort of DNA of Blue Owl. I think part of the reason we have been able to succeed as a preferred corporate capital partner is by going to people and saying, I want to reassure you, we are not the cheapest solution.
I want to assure you, our loan documents are going to be a lot more restrictive than the public market, and our due diligence will probably be measurably more annoying and invasive. We would stop there and would say, well, that is quite the losing proposition. What we have been proving to more and more people, which is important to understand in this interplay, is that is all true, but it is also true that we will give you three Ps, predictability, privacy, and partnership, and you and I have talked about this. Predictability of terms, it does not matter if between the time we started talking and we finished, April occurred or it was February, we are going to sign up to a set of terms that we know are the right long-term risk-adjusted returns for our investors.
We are going to give you the privacy of it does not matter if Moody's changed their mind on their view of the overall economy, and so therefore you are downgraded without any specificity to, well, wait a minute, I am a domestic high-growth software business, why did that really matter to me? Most importantly, partnership, that you know who your lender is and your lender is with you all the way along that journey. Remember, these are big capital structures with gigantic equity checks. With all that taken together, I say all that partly because it is the value proposition we get paid for, it is why we get to charge a premium, but it is also really how we compete with the syndicated market. Most, not all, most users are not really just trading back and forth between the two because that is a fundamentally different experience.
If your highest priority is cheapest cost to capital, I do not really care where it comes from, you are probably going to use the syndicated market. If your highest view is, yes, I am going to pay some more for a couple few years, but I really care about who gives me the capital, and I just want to know the day and I want to know the terms, that is worth something to me, they are probably going to use us. There is some stuff that happens in between. All that feeds to the following. When the syndicated market is more active, of course, that person on the bubble will tip more to the syndicated market. When the syndicated market is not available, they will tip more to our market. The one last difference I will highlight is this.
When they tip to the syndicated market, when the market closes, they'll be back, which is to say, we're an always-on market. The syndicated market's on and off. This is a stark contrast. I started in alts 30 years ago. The public market was always available. The bank market was always available. Alts were like the episodic participant. That's reversed in direct lending and credit. When I look at the market in total, when the syndicated market closes, people have no choice but to use the private market. When the syndicated market opens, the people that tried the private market, many of them, not all, conclude that the trade-off was good and they stay. That's why the market share has been almost like this. It's kind of a stair-step function. Something happens, a lot of people use the private market.
It was, of course, originally COVID if we look over the last five years. Then it was rapidly rising interest rates. Then it was Silicon Valley Bank blowing up. Then it was maybe rates are coming down. Then it was tariffs. There is no shortage of things that remind people, hey, you know what? I am going to try this. I try it. I am going to repeat it. We kind of get these step functions every time something gets a little funky in the world and we get kind of sampling, like giving out food at the grocery store. Someone tries our cheese and likes it.
Makes sense. That being a lot of investors are concerned that there's just so much dry powder in your business now that spreads will continue to tighten, which could be a headwind to the revenue yields you earn. What is that view missing? More specifically, how have those new deployment spreads been tracking through all the volatility this year?
Let me answer the short-term and slightly longer-term version of that. I guess the data defies that logic because in point of fact, spreads have widened back up from their bottoms. Not a lot, not a lot, but as you know, they have widened back up 25 basis points, maybe 50, depending on the circumstance. The actual on-the-ground data tells us it is not some unidirectional movement. However, taking a step back and looking long-term, really at the end of the day, we are a premium to that public market and that premium price is maybe the value of those other attributes, so to speak. Our premium, if you look over the last 10 years, has actually run pretty steady. It does not really, yeah, of course, again, it moves quarter to quarter, moment to moment, but actually it is pretty steady.
It is true that if spreads in the whole world compress, our spreads tend to go with that. We do not live in a bubble and vice versa. If spreads widen, our spreads tend to widen. The gap, which is really what people pay us for, has actually been pretty consistent. The last point I will make is about the structure of the industry and the nature of the spreads as we see it and foresee it. There is a band that effectively is where this industry operates. It, of course, does not have an absolute hard ceiling or an absolute hard floor. The practical reality is the kind of almost the implicit partnership between the PE borrowers or corporate non-PE borrowers and the providers of capital and our investors is, listen, there is a certain spread below which it just does not meet the cost of capital for our investors.
We're just not going to do it. Frankly, there's a certain spread on the other side that no sophisticated borrower is going to take the money on a high-quality credit. In an emergency, people do all kinds of things. If I have a really high-quality credit and I'm a high-quality PE firm, I'm just not signing up for an S plus 1,000 loan. This is not going to happen. The reality is that over time, what's really happened is we've porpoised in between what amounts to these kind of resistance on the bottom, resistance at the top, and then the portfolios porpoise even less because, of course, we have hundreds of loans made during all those times. There's like this happening with probably the spread of the moment, and then there's this happening with the spread of the fund, all of which works pretty well.
It works for the users. It works for us. It works for our investors. I actually have found it to be pretty stable. Can we describe circumstances that could destabilize it? Some, sure, of course we could. When markets close entirely, our spreads go way up. When markets are wild and open, I mean, our spreads come down some.
One more on this topic. I think there's kind of a knee-jerk reaction to say, okay, particularly when we have volatility we've had the last couple of months, that, okay, M&A is going to be lower this year, so that's bad for direct lending deployment. Why is that view wrong? And what are kind of the offsets to new deal deployment that can keep your origination activity steady or even growing in a less robust M&A environment?
Let's start with this. All things otherwise being equal, less M&A activity is negative. Call it what it is. I think you'll find our approach is always going to be just stark candor. And it's a negative relative inactive M&A market. With that said, there are offsets, right? The offsets with a less active M&A market often, not always, will correlate with some of these market uncertainties that also will tend to limit. I mean, there was like two weeks where there was not a single syndicated loan launched in April. You know, these things don't, again, they don't live in isolation. That world of low M&A is a world of uncertainty. A world of uncertainty is probably not great for liquid markets, which pushes market share in our direction. There's less refinancing in a market like.
Part of the thing we have to all keep up with, of course, is by having permanent capital vehicles, money gets repaid, goes back to work. We have had this where we have had our highest gross originations do not always translate into our highest net originations, which to your point is actually the measure of incremental deployment and therefore incremental fees for our shareholders and for us. Whereas we had actually less in Q1, we had less deployment gross, but more deployment net than we did the prior quarter. Actually for our business, the net deployment number will matter more. None of it is going to matter much for 2025 earnings because of the nature of our business. On the margin, that actually is a net positive. There are a few moving variables that would say to me, a tepid M&A market, I would rather have an active one.
When you consider all the other mitigants, it's fine.
Do you think because there is so much direct lending dry powder that you could start to see a situation where when you have these pullbacks, the private equity firms can still deploy, whereas historically when they were more dependent on the broadly syndicated market, they were kind of hamstrung?
I think the whole alts landscape has changed as the capital market system around it, right? Which is if you now have a really deep private equity market and a really deep private credit market, all of which has a longer horizon, a longer cycle, less impacted by the commotion of the day, plus and minus, then you just have more durable activity in M&A or just for the economy in general because there's capital available kind of through thick and thin. Absolutely. Private equity firms are no longer closed out of the market by virtue of capital markets, frankly, at all. I mean, again, we can all try to draw up extremists where nobody wants to do anything, but they won't want to be buyers in that market either.
Anytime private equity is kind of ready to be active, it's very likely that being the top 40% with them 60% below us, we're probably going to be pretty open-minded too. I think that's made a very, very big difference to durability of our business and durability of just the capital system in total. That's a good thing for the economy. By the way, can I say one thing?
Sure.
You said with all the dry powder, and I don't want to suggest there isn't meaningful dry powder, but I also think we have to break down dry powder in this market a little bit into the pyramid of providers. So, there's a lot have been over the last five years, a lot of new entrants at the base of the pyramid, $500 million fund, $1 billion fund. And I don't say this to be like dismissive or obnoxious, but they're irrelevant to us. They don't finance what we finance. At the top of the pyramid, there's we and the same few people that were in the top of the pyramid five years ago. Now the big have gotten bigger. We're bigger. We have more powder. So do they. But the addressable market's bigger and the PE firms are bigger. Of course, again, there's different balances.
Today, I think it's fair to say we are more ready to lend than the PE firms are ready to buy. That's true. That'll move around, but I can tell you this with certainty. I did PE for 20 plus years before starting this business. The PE fund money will go to work. I can tell you it's not going back to the investors. I've yet to see someone say, what a pity, couldn't find anything to buy. Here's your money back.
All right. Let's move to retail, kind of staying on the macro theme. One issue that I think has factored into concerns on Blue Owl stock specifically is retail flows and their potential volatility around market volatility, given I think 50% of your flows come from retail. Could you update us on how retail flow and redemption trends have tracked through Liberation Day volatility into today? In that vein, are you seeing any sign that the retail investor base might be starting to see alternative products as a port in the storm as opposed to something to redeem from?
Yeah, we're seeing exactly that phenomenon, which is incredibly encouraging. The actual behavior, even in the kind of moment of April panic, was extremely modest in terms of people. In fact, we continued to have very strong net inflows. They have continued to snap along really beautifully and continue even after that exceptionally brief kind of stutter step, if you will, by investors. I think what you said is exactly the reason. It's the port of security. We're still paying out every month our dividend, and we're still making really good loans. I think people are looking and saying, flight to safety. This actually is the flight to safety. This is the flight to quality to go, particularly to Blue Owl, right? Our space in the land of direct lending is particularly the larger cap.
Our credit loss is over a decade now of around 13 basis points a year. We are all about durability. Back to the point, there may be like a slight pause because anyone gets scared in a moment of uncertainty. I actually think it ends up ricocheting back with ultimately greater results because now people say, where should I go now? I do not know. These public markets scare me. What if there is a bad tweet tomorrow morning? I think I am going to go do that. I think that is our experience. I like this. Is it flawless? You can always debate the behavior of any group. I will proffer this. I am not convinced that individual investors are somehow more erratic or herd-like than institutions. In fact, institutions, I mean, look what is happening right now. Endowments could not buy enough private equity if they tried.
Now they're turning around selling it at a discount, all of them. Was that some highly rational strategy? They all hug benchmarks. They all have these strict ideas of allocation. Individuals do not. They do not have, oh my gosh, I have a denominator problem. That is not happening in an individual conversation. I am not so sure. There are different moments and different things in the world that would scare an individual into some erratic behavior that is different from an institution. I actually think marrying them both together, no surprise, a little bit like diversification, is a really good thing because they are not by any measure perfectly correlated.
Since it is such an important part of your growth algorithm, and I do not think anybody would argue that it is better to be big in retail than not, given the secular trends, I want to broaden out on that opportunity. You have three established flagship products, a just launched alternative credit product. Could you update us on where you are in broadening the distribution footprint for those products, particularly in the non-U.S. pipes, which I think you are earlier in the stages of than other players?
Yeah. The products, as you note, we have our diversified core income product, CIC. We have our software lending business, TIC, technology income. Then we have our triple net lease, our real estate business, ORENT. Those are the three existing products. Now we have just brought out, and it is not even available for wide distribution yet, the interval fund, the alternative credit interval fund. Those four. In the order I described them is the order of kind of their relative penetration. By the way, not surprisingly, reflects kind of their relative time of task. Core income is the most broadly available. Certainly in the U.S., it would be available almost in any place you want to get it. Outside the U.S., increasingly, but we are more focused. You are absolutely correct. We are underpenetrated to Japan, for example.
I'm off to Japan next week. Not coincidental. We get that that's now an emerging opportunity set. And we have a lot of what that market wants. We do a lot of business in Japan with the institutions, which gives us good credit and credibility. Yes. The expansion for something like a diversified lending is on these dimensions. Non-U.S., in the U.S., we have the footprint. In the U.S., it's more FAs and more FAs with more clients. By the way, that's the biggest white space of all. The biggest practical addressable white space is actually in the U.S. with FAs that haven't touched it at all and with the FAs that have, their clients that haven't used it at all. That's the biggest part of this. That's the juiciest center. The international is additive for sure, particularly in Asia.
Europe has always proven just tricky with regard to alts and probably in general beyond insurance companies, certainly for individuals. That will come along over time too, I imagine. There is that. You take technology income, a little narrower distribution, actually a little more international in that case, but just fewer people that had it than core income. ORENT, which is our fastest growing product, this gets down to, hey, not all things are created equal. ORENT is a substantial net capital raiser, the only real estate product in the market that is a net capital raiser because it's a different strategy and it works. We deliver great steady results back to what Blue Owl does. It isn't just another real estate product. We do not go buy other properties. We do triple net lease. We work with a corporate.
We work with someone like Amazon, and we do a distribution warehouse, and they sign up a lease for 20 years. It is a really durable way to invest in real estate. As a result, our flows in ORENT have continued to grow rapidly. That has low distribution. That is not meaningfully distributed outside the U.S. It is not even fully distributed in the U.S. It follows this tiering. There is the opportunity for global, for some of the bigger products. There is the opportunity for just broader penetration for some of those less mature products. For every product, there is just this reality, which is a small percentage of individuals use alts today. Not everyone's going to. It is a long trip from 4% of individuals use alts to some gigantic number.
When you're dealing with, and I have a different number for it, $100 trillion, $250 trillion, whatever you want to apply it to, every point is a gigantic amount of money relative to what's already in the system today.
For sure. The other side of the coin is obviously new product development. You mentioned the four products that are out. What does the pipeline look for new products over the year? What is the sweet spot, do you think? How many products do you see needing in the suite now that you've added so many strategies, which we'll get to in a little bit?
In terms of new products in general, do you mean in wealth or just in general?
In wealth.
Yeah. So, in wealth, the other product on the flight deck is our wealth accessible version of digital infrastructure, our hyperscale data center business. That's been an institutional-only product before. We just closed on an all-time record fund for that. Not a comment you hear a lot in today's environment. That fund was nearly twice the size of the prior one, $7 billion fund. By the way, the majority of it already committed and spoken for or earmarked. The demand for that capital by the users is enormous. We have a highly specialized capability to actually not just deploy the capital, the capital married with the ability to actually design and deliver a data center that reliably the people like Microsoft and Amazon are willing to rely on.
Or in this case, as you know, like the Stargate project, $15 billion project last year with Oracle, last week with Oracle. All of that taken together, that is an incredibly attractive area for us. There has been no wealth accessible product. That is on the flight deck next for us to bring, which is essentially a little bit like TIC technology income was to our diversified lending. It is a little bit of an analog. ORENT, which is doing extremely well, is a broad triple net lease business. This is going to be focused specifically on these hyperscale data centers, which in this case, fortuitously, and obviously not coincidental, this was the intent. The five people that matter in terms of building data centers have spectacular credit ratings. In the case of one, better than the U.S. government. In the case of others, pretty close.
Every one of them, I think the smallest of the hyperscalers has a $500 billion market cap. Of course, we all know what Amazon and Google.
Do you think that will be the first product in the retail channel specifically focused on digital infrastructure?
I think it'll be, how about, I think it'll be the best product. First, I don't know. I mean, people are running around. You could put together a product and try to introduce it. But the kind of first product that really works and scales, I feel highly confident we have a distinctive product capability with a distinctive track record and the infrastructure to deliver it. I feel very good about being one of the winners, let's say, in that category, whether we're the first or not the first.
The other side of the retail or wealth opportunity broadly is retirement and 401(k), where you have less penetration. What are your thoughts on trying to attack that opportunity? Is it even that big of an opportunity in your view?
It's theoretically a big opportunity. And if one just kind of jumps forward enough years, I have to believe for good reason that alts will be a part of the 401(k) landscape. I mean, after all, retirees are already depending on alts in a huge way. In fact, it's been part of the success of the defined benefit plans. It's a slightly not artificial distinction, but it's kind of a curious one. It's already part of the retirement system, but just over here, and if you're over here, you can't have it. I think jump ahead.
Now, whether that's near or long term, knowing the pace of things evolve, particularly when you have a lot of complex regulation, a lot of complex decision makers, fiduciary duties that have to be re-understood, I would take the longer end than the shorter end of that being a big deal. When we think about our, as you know, we did our five-year outlook at our investor day, none of that was predicated on the retirement market opening up. If you then said to us, well, when we hear from you some number of years from now, about five years after that, sitting here today, I suspect that retirement will be a part of that.
Our products, I'm really going to sound like I'm just trying to talk my own book here, but our products being income-oriented and more about NAV stability are the entry point for retirement accounts. I mean, that's what you would logically first go into if you're saying, I've been fearful of doing anything outside of traditional assets. What should my first thing be in alts? It probably ought to be an income sort of structured product that's more protected. Because people, if their first foray, and let's take it to the extreme, which it won't be, was venture capital, and they're like, I'm doing great, I'm doing great, I'm doing terrible. That's probably not going to be a great way to win in retirement.
For sure. You have added a lot of new businesses over the last year, which I personally believe should better position you for some of the key super trends in alternative management. It is a lot at once. I think a lot of investors are having a hard time getting their heads around it. Want to hit on each one for a little bit?
Yeah, please.
First, we've teased a bit AI infrastructure with your acquisition of IPI Partners. It's no secret how big the capital need is there. How should we think about this new platform's ability to compete for those opportunities and then how it fits into your broader triple net lease assets platform?
Sure. If it's okay, Patrick, let me say one thing about the whole underpinning methodology or strategy behind our acquisition schedule and form the answer to that question. When we look ahead as a firm, what we try to do is, and you've heard us talk about this, we use the Wayne Gretzky skate to where the puck is going, not to where it was. I really like that imagery a lot because I think it is what we're constantly talking about, which is 10 years ago, we thought the puck was headed toward individuals becoming participants in the market. We thought it was headed toward income-oriented products or even put more narrowly at that point. It was, look, you have this giant thing called private equity. Why wouldn't there be a corollary called private credit?
That is our view of the puck 10 years ago was that is where it was headed. That has brought us to this place. We said we want to add to that because we think the puck is going with, it turns out we were right about people's desire for more income-oriented strategies. What else looks an awful lot like that? That brought us to our triple net lease real estate product, which is real estate because you own the asset and you get the depreciation. Let us be clear, it is a credit product. When we go and we say, here is a 20-year lease, that is a 20-year corporate commitment to pay us. We get paid back, of course, return and essentially all the capital on the way. It is a lot like a loan, except it is to a far better credit than our typical lending credit.
These things are kind of built around an access or a DNA of our firm. All that is a way of saying when we look to where the puck is going, we still, of course, do see the individual investor market as part of where the puck is going. We do see these more stable income-oriented products as continuing to be part of it, but to a different part of that rink, which is we thought data centers, mismatch, available capital, supply, demand for capital, alternative credit, 5% penetration by the private solutions, just like direct lending was 10 years ago with a very comparable use for certain borrowers. They are going to value the durability of having a partner like us, and they will pay for it. It is the same proposition.
To do those, our view, and this now gets to the IPI, our approach, not everyone does this, there's the organic and the inorganic approach. Our view is any product we're in, we aspire to be the best or one of the best. If that means it's organic because nobody else does it, then that's how we'll build it. If you take like our Blue Owl Strategic Equity, our GP-led secondaries product, nobody did it. Still, nobody does it the way I think it has to be done to win in that market, just like direct lending. We built that organically. It's a big product for us now. I mean, it's not big compared to $275 billion, but it'll sure matter five years from now back to where the puck is going.
It sure is an answer for locked up capital and LP's need for liquidity. I think we were skating to that puck because we were talking about it two years ago. It would be like, I do not know, GP-led. All of a sudden, you hear it. I do not know there is a private equity firm out there that is not saying, well, I should do one of those because I have to get some liquidity, but I do not want to give up my trophy asset. All that feeds, okay, we said digital infrastructure. What is a data center the way we do it? Not all data centers. Every earnings call this quarter, every single person in my seat will talk about data centers. Every person, right? For obvious reasons.
For sure.
Let me be clear what we do and do not do. We build under long-term arrangement with a very strong counterparty, just like, not just like, in fact, exactly like we do in triple net lease. To do this, you need a set of relationships that includes not just, we have had a long-standing relationship with Amazon through the distribution centers and triple net lease real estate, but doing hyperscale data centers, that is a different competency. We did not do business with Microsoft in triple net lease. They would not have any interest in that, but they are doing a lot in data centers. You needed the credibility, but also the capability. We bought IPI because IPI not only has been doing this 10 years.
You look at the chart for hyperscale data centers, we're not like on our minds, I don't speak for everyone in this room, but certainly wasn't mine. I'll bet for most people, those words didn't cross your lips 10 years ago because the hyperscale data center market was this big. It did cross IPI's mind because they said, every time we go around, people are saying, hey, what about that thing called Amazon Web Services? How are you going to compete with that? They said, I got an idea. Maybe I won't. Why don't I go to them and say, hey, how about we do this thing called like a sale lease back, basically? All we've done is say, who's the best in the business at building these pretty much more technically complex facilities?
We're already, I do not want to say this arrogantly, we're certainly the biggest, I think the best in the business at triple net lease real estate in general. Marry those two. That is a winner for IPI and a winner for us. Now it is fully integrated. Take a look at Stargate. Stargate will actually be a part of both portfolios, be a part of our triple net lease real estate portfolio where it actually originated. Now we have been married in IPI. We have that many more capabilities and dollars to do a $15 billion, it is the biggest data center project being built in the U.S. today.
On that, I think one of the more interesting takeaways from your last call is how the deployment works for these big projects. I think you said you had $3 billion-$4 billion of committed capital, but that will come into the fee earnings over, I forget, at least 12 months-ish. Is that about right?
Yeah. Depends on the project, depends how we get paid. Yes, these are staged in over time because we basically fund as we build.
You can kind of like a layering effect of the visibility on that.
Exactly.
Capital turning on fees.
Each time you turn on a new Stargate or a new data center, there's a new upward sloping use of capital.
The second one, I'm going backwards in time.
Yeah. Sure.
Is in alternative credit or ABS. You added Atalaya. This is a market where people are talking about tens of trillions of dollars of TAM. Many of your competitors have larger, much more established ABF businesses. How does Atalaya fit into that ecosystem? How does it differentiate itself? Do you guys internally see the addressable market as big as what others are talking about?
Objectively, the addressable market's extremely large. I mean, that, again, we can always pick at what you want to include or not include, but it's at least as big as the direct lending market. It might be arguably as bigger depending on how you calculate it. When you correctly say other people, we know who they are, a couple of people that are quote bigger in asset-backed credit than we are, that is true because we hadn't been in asset-backed credit. Back to the point though, there's bigger and there's better. Our view back to the point was a lot of people are launching alternative credit businesses. Some have launched them years ago and they've built very credible businesses. I don't take anything away from that. Back to my earlier point, you'll see a pattern emerging, which I know you're drawing out.
Atalaya has done asset-backed credit for 20 years. Back to the point. Twenty years ago, nobody thought that was an interesting idea. Now, everybody thinks it's an interesting idea, but who do you want to do it with? Someone that's done it through tons of cycles, tried all the different product areas, structures, has data. We have data on 100 million different consumers, a couple million different small businesses, all of which you have to crunch to decide. It's not a direct loan. It's not here's one company make a singular seven-year decision. It's looking at thousands and thousands of pieces of data to decide, do you want to do it? And Atalaya has done it incredibly well, like incredibly well for the last 20 years. We said, we want to be the best. The biggest may or may not end up being true.
In fact, it'd probably be hard to be bigger than an insurance company because it's their balance sheet. Apollo is likely to be bigger in alternative credit than we are. Bigger and better aren't identical. We're going to deliver great results because we have some of the best actual investors in it now scaling on the Blue Owl platform. Therein lies the same marriage you just heard about in IPI. People who are best of breed at the investment side, we marry them with our infrastructure and our kind of information sharing integrated into Blue Owl, and now they can, for lack of a better term, they now play in the big leagues. That's the marriage, as I'm using that term, a purpose we're looking for. We don't acquire something someone wants to sell.
If you're selling it so they can leave, we definitionally don't want it. Because our whole point is to buy the competence. I mean, sure, you could buy assets, that's fine. You buy a CLO contract, it'll meet around the fringes. But if we're buying a strategy, it's because we want that team. Otherwise, we'll just build it ourselves if we didn't think they were so good at it.
Yeah. Okay. The last big piece about a year ago, you added Kuvare Asset Management. Kuvare is an insurance company. So firstly, I think it'd be helpful to get an update on how the partnership is evolving since the closing about a year ago.
Yeah. Kuvare is the asset manager part of Kuvare Insurance. To clarify importantly, kind of our decision, not the only decision or definitionally the right decision of the industry, we did not buy the insurance business. What we did is we bought from them their captive asset manager, which allowed Blue Owl to now have a full suite mechanism, capability to deliver what any insurance company might want across any part of their asset pool. Obviously, we already had the alts and we were deeper on the alts than Kuvare Asset Management would be, but they have a lot of capabilities, including, of course, the technology around rating sensitivity and capital charges that associate with insurance strategies that was very additive.
What we were buying from our point of view with Kuvare was a skill set and an access to a channel that was the third piece we did not have. We have been early in wealth, early, well, normal in institution, and we were late in insurance compared to our bigger peers. We are adding that third channel and we are doing it through what would be the Blue Owl approach. We think we are good at asset management. We do not think we are good at insurance. I certainly know it is not my area of core competence. We are trying to stay focused on what we are really good at, stay true to our model of fee-centric earnings, high margin, low balance sheet intensity. That is how we have entered.
With Kuvare, we now have, it's been very productive for us coming up on a year to now have integrated those capabilities so that we now have our asset-backed business really communicating, coordinating with our insurance business, our direct lending business, coordinating with insurance, our fundraising capability, working with our insurance capability. I think we are now in a place where we can start to see some of the benefits of that third distribution channel, which is the way I look at it. I would distinguish it from the first two. The first two were capabilities for what I'll call emerging markets. The third was really an ability to distribute to a channel that we didn't distribute to before.
Is this still predominantly distributing to fund Kuvare's growth?
Mostly to date, and now we're starting to add. Now we're in a place to have those conversations to say, here's now the integrated solution for you. By the way, maybe some of you prefer an integrated solution from someone who's not also competing with you in your insurance business. It's not a crazy statement to say, do you want your competitor doing your asset management, or would you like someone whose asset management business is doing your asset management?
That debate continues.
It has pluses and minuses. Listen, the ability to say.
I can see both.
That's what's happening with your insurance money. It's advantageous to the manager, to be clear. I'm not sure I know why it would be advantageous to a big global insurance company to say, I'd really like one of my primary competitors to control my assets.
After all these transactions, how should we think about your capital priorities now? Is M&A still a core part of that strategy? What are the biggest areas of white space you see filling in organically, if so?
We have what we, I would need, I suppose, is quotes, need. We have the couple that we really felt we needed, wanted to be positioned to continue dramatically outsized growth in a manner consistent with our strategy. That was all credit, Atalaya and IPI Digital Infrastructure. When we said, where's the puck going, that was where the puck was going. We said, we really want those solutions. If we can find someone who's really good at it, that's a cultural fit, and we did. Great. That kind of not done and dusted because now, of course, always the hard work is building. We have that. We have them integrated. It's working really well. There are other areas that we would view as additive, but not necessary. We have a very active pipeline of M&A conversations.
Most M&A conversations do not go anywhere, often because of culture fit. We are not a collective of franchises. We are not a bunch of people running around doing their own thing, but once in a while putting on a Blue Owl hat. We are one firm. We understand that every LP we have and every product we all work for, and that is how we operate as a firm. That requires a certain kind of culture. Again, it does not mean it is the only right culture, but our culture is all about teamwork and excellence and understanding who we work for at every moment and understanding our DNA. We are not trying to be all things to all people. We want to be a handful of things and do really good at those for the people.
Big, I mean, we're a pretty big company now with $275 billion of assets and growing, but it's far more focused probably than some other strategies. Are there other areas we would be interested in adding? Absolutely. They're not as critical as having those two were. They aren't as central to where we currently define the puck as it would go in. Would we add the right European direct lending capability? Absolutely. It's a perfectly complementary business. It's not a hyper-growth business the way Atalaya and digital infrastructure are. It doesn't have that same, okay, I want to go there because for the next 10 years, I want to pick up what I did in direct lending. Obviously, with the right culture fit, it'd be a very logical thing to do. In infrastructure, we do digital infrastructure. That's the hyper-growth market.
There are other parts of infrastructure that would be extremely compatible for us. Yeah, we will continue to look. It will always be, I'll say, opportunistic, and it will always be predicated on a careful fit between the firms.
Makes sense. I do not want to leave without talking about GP Stakes. It is not the biggest piece of the growth story, but for that reason, I sense many investors are still kind of mystified and a little bit skeptical of it as an asset class. Maybe to start, for those that are less familiar with your story and the asset class, could you give a quick overview of how that asset class works and why it is such an attractive asset class for investors?
Absolutely. Because GP Stakes is a fantastic experience for LPs, and it's a fantastic business to manage. It's very long-dated, it's perpetual capital by its legal structure. There's no end date to our funds. It's very attractive economically for us. It's very stable. We like it. The LPs have had, if you square the returns in that product suite against, there are almost no peers. In fact, there are really no peers for what we do, but squared against PE, it's clearly an upper quartile performer in every vintage. It really works. All that said, let me, to your point, just say out loud, GP Strategic Capital is our business where we raise funds to buy minority stakes in other alternative asset managers. Our particular specialty is large-cap asset managers. In that business, we are far and away the largest and I think best performing.
In that case, our last fund was $13 billion. I think the next competitor's fund is $4 billion. It is kind of a market of one, which is a bit what probably makes it feel exotic to people. However, if you just unpack it for a second, all it is, is the other side of the alternatives equation. If you believe, as we all have and continue to believe, alts grows as a marketplace, then there are two ways to participate. You can be one of the dollars as an LP, which almost everybody already is, but you could alternatively or additively, and this is important, say, wait a minute, I think I'd like to be a GP. I think it is great being in Starwood Fund II, but I think I'd rather be Barry Sternlicht. That is the opportunity we are presenting.
You really synthetically become a GP in, and in this case, these are actual examples. We own part of Veritas, part of Silver Lake, part of CVC, part of Vista. I mean, these are incredible franchises. As you all know, firms like that are very durable. For the LP, you get to be a GP, you get a durable income stream that is much less dependent on the question of what's the exact timing of what happens in one of these firms because you're collecting fee income. Not only everyone's crying for the GPs today, even if they're not generating carry. You get to sit in that seat. It's a nice complementary additive strategy or replace, if you want, what people might call their PE allocation. We are seeing an uptick in interest and uptake in the product for that reason.
People are starting to say, as opposed to thinking of GP Stakes as its own allocation, because again, it's sort of N of one in terms of what we do. What we are seeing more people do is say, hey, you know I'm pretty full up on PE, or PE is fine, but I kind of maybe it's not quite where I want to be incrementally today, but I like the alts market. I even like the PE market. I think I'll take a piece of this. We are seeing registered investment advisors, RIA platforms show an interest in this product. I think in many cases, they're doing it in addition to or in place of what would have been just private equity firm number 32, which people just don't have a lot of appetite for.
We'll see if that emerges into a meta trend or not, but it's healthy overall.
On that, are you seeing the kind of broader concern around fundraising within alts and in particular private equity impacting the growth trajectory of the portfolios that you have stakes in? Through that lens, has any of the recent volatility changed your confidence in the next flagship fundraising?
Yeah. So this kind of consolidating period for private equity, or whatever I want to call it, but we're clearly in a lowered overall fundraising period for private equity. That's a negative for anything in private equity. However, there is an offset. The big are getting bigger, and we back the big. As the middle, which is, I think, and everyone will have informed opinions, I think the most vulnerable part of the private equity ecosphere is your middle-sized generalist because it's a little bit like, what's my reason to be? You have the large firms with all the resources, and they're kind of the, you ever got fired for using IBM, there's sort of that category of usage. Then there's the super deep specialists. I think people credibly believe there's alpha to be found somewhere in there. This middle is getting kind of squeezed out.
That actually benefits the firms that we back. What's the net of that? Too early to say in terms of the net of it. Right now, I think what we're generally finding is people in the large end are still getting pretty close to their target fund size, but it's taking longer. Middle market firms, many are just, they're done. They're just not raising any funds. Some of the specialists are, that's a mix, but some are doing very nicely. Just look at the secondary sales going on in PE today. We're clearly entering a different era of allocation. I just was reading the update on New York City's pension fund selling $5 billion of assets, and it said they sold, these kind of mind-bending numbers, right? They sold stakes or LP interest with 74 different managers in 125 different funds in $5 billion.
I mean, it's just the proliferation of the managers. They just said, and now they're saying we have 45 remaining managers who we're going to keep doing business with. Okay, of that 45, odds are it includes mostly the kind we back, and the ones that got kicked out are probably mostly not the kind we're involved with.
Okay. Fair enough. And confidence on the next flagship? No change?
Yeah, we're doing fine. Yeah. In fact, I mean, technically ahead of the pace we were for the last fund, but it'll be a back-end loaded phenomenon as we've been talking about. You tend to get early closes, and then you tend to get last closes, but yeah, all fine.
Summing it all up, we've talked about a lot of pretty exciting growth opportunities. In your recent investor day, you said this sums up to 20%+ fee earnings growth. As you think about all these different drivers across retail, infra, triple net lease, alternative credit, where do you see the mix of the business shifting? Which of those verticals do you think has the most potential to surprise most positively versus your already pretty punchy expectations?
The most upside exists in digital infrastructure because it's the least penetrated market with some of the most special attributes at a moment in time where the best capitalized, smartest company in the world are saying, this is the place to be. For the next five years, I think that just creates an awful lot of opportunity to kind of overperform. That probably has the most overperformance as a proportion of the base case. The biggest absolute dollars are undeniably the continued individual access, just dollars, right? Because back to the point, whenever we talk, if alternative credit's $10 trillion and if you need $1 trillion of capital for hyperscale data centers in the next few years, all of that is literally a fragment of $100 billion or $250 billion of retail investor assets in the world. The biggest long-term pie is here.
The sweetest combination, and we're not here to sell people on outperforming. Our job is to perform because we're already setting expectations and doing something steadier than most. The way you can get outperformance, and it's not like a corner case, is, when I marry individual investors with a hyper-growth market like alternative credit or digital infrastructure, that's growth on growth. That's where if either one of those levers moves the right way, the whole thing tips up. That's probably the room for net outperformance. All that said, our business, again, we like to call them straight. What we do now doesn't matter for 2025. Our business was built to not matter what we do in 2025 for 2025. What we do now will matter some for 2026, more for 2027 and beyond.
That's the kind of durability of the heart of the business.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you as always. Appreciate it. Thank you all.