I'm Robert Lee, Head of Shareholder Relations at Patria, and welcome to our second PaxTalks, an investor-driven deep dive into value creation in our infrastructure business. We're very happy to have with us today, leading the Q&A, Matt Cook. Matt is an investor at Protégé Partners, which was founded in 2021 with a global long-short strategy focused on small and mid-cap businesses. Before Protégé, Matt was a private equity and public markets investor in frontier and emerging markets. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Cape Town and has master's and MBA degrees in the U.K. and the U.S. From Patria, we are very pleased to welcome Roberto Sidarra, Partner and Chief of Portfolio Management for Infrastructure. Roberto is basically in charge of essentially managing the portfolio, companies, and projects, and overseeing value creation. This will be a fireside chat Q&A format.
If you do have questions, each of you will have an opportunity to submit them, and we'll try to get to as many as we can. Of course, before we get started, and I do some other introductory remarks, I have to read the obligatory forward-looking statement. I would like to remind everyone that today's call may include forward-looking statements, which are uncertain, do not guarantee future performance, and undue reliance should not be placed on them. Patria assumes no obligation and does not intend to update any such forward-looking statements. Such statements are based on current management expectations and involve risks, including those discussed in the risk factors section of our latest Form 20F annual report. Also note that no statements on this call constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any Patria fund.
As a foreign private issuer, Patria reports financial results using International Financial Reporting Standards, or IFRS, as opposed to U.S. GAAP. Additionally, we would like to remind everyone that we will refer to certain non-IFRS measures, which we believe are relevant in assessing the financial performance of the business, but which should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for measures prepared in accordance with IFRS. Reconciliations of these measures to the most comparable IFRS measures are included in our various earnings presentations and SEC filings. Okay, with that out of the way, let me start off by framing and putting some perspective on our infrastructure platform, why it's important to investors before turning it over to Matt and Roberto. To start, our infrastructure platform started in 2006, is currently raising Development Fund 5, which, along with related vehicles, has over $2.1 billion of fee-paying commitments.
Our infrastructure platform, which includes development, core, core plus, and infrastructure credit, has over $6.7 billion of AUM, $3.7 billion of fee-earning AUM, $1.6 billion of pending fee-earning AUM, which includes recently raised separately managed accounts, and $3 billion of total uncalled capital. The vast majority of this capital is in our flagship development funds currently, although our long-term plan is to further develop our core and credit strategies. From a financial and growth perspective, as of the first quarter, this business generated approximately 17% of our management fee revenues, and we expect infrastructure fund 3 will continue to be the main source of our performance fee generation over the next year or so.
We definitely view infrastructure as a key component of our growth strategy at Patria, with solid global and increasing local demand, as evidenced by the $900 million of capital we raised in the first quarter in this vertical, driven by two large separately managed accounts from two sovereign wealth funds. We note that at our December 9th Investor Day, we indicated that we believe infrastructure fee-earning AUM can grow to 12%-16% of our total fee-earning AUM from 10% today, suggesting a potential fee-earning AUM growth rate of over 30% per annum as demand expands and as we expand our range of product offerings. How do we do this? Investment performance is, of course, key, and a key point of differentiation of our platform is our boots-on-the-ground development strategy, which Matt and Roberto will review.
Simply put, we have over 80 professionals in our infrastructure business, not including only investment teams, but engineers, operations professionals, and other professionals who oversee the value creation process that Roberto oversees. We think this gives us a competitive advantage over many peers to operate across the region and an ability to generate consistent excess returns. We also believe this growth potential is supported by significant deployment opportunities within the region. As we reviewed at our Investor Day, we see actionable pipeline in the region of over $400 billion over the next five years across various strategies and on a more granular level, recently announced the start of a new data center platform, which we expect will have twice the capacity of our last one. With that as a backdrop, let me turn it over to Matt and Roberto. Guys, thank you for doing this, and it's all yours.
Thanks, Rob. Yeah, look, thanks for doing this, guys. I appreciate it a lot. And you know, as investors, I think as we've plugged into Pax and the story, and obviously after the Investor Day in December, as you just outlined, you know, 30% AUM growth being a target or an implied target for the infrastructure business, it just shows that for the public markets, you know, FRE per share is a key metric, and infrastructure is going to be a massive driver of incremental FRE per share between now and 2027 under the plan. I think it's an important part of the business to understand better. And probably also just to sort of try and, from our perspective at least, correct some of the perception that Patria is a "private equity manager" when it's much more than that. And you've had relative success in infrastructure.
There's a good track record and hopefully a lot of fundraising to come. Yeah, we wanted to just understand a few things better. The first is just clarifying a couple of things, and then I wanted to come on to two, I think, two key topics which hopefully drive the equity story and I think are key to driving the FRE per share. The first is, why does Patria deserve to win in infrastructure? Sure, there's a great big opportunity, but why should you get that AUM from global LPs and not someone else? The second is just a bit more granularity on the opportunity. I think the thing that's potentially quite exciting is, are these privatizations happening in Brazil? Before that, Rob, you mentioned $6.7 billion of AUM.
Roberto, how much of that is the legacy or the core equity strategy, which you guys also call development, and then how much is the other stuff?
Sure. First of all, good morning, everyone. Really happy to be here. Thanks, Matt and Rob, for the introductions and for doing that. I think as most of you know, I mean, infrastructure started here with the development group, right, with the development funds. 20 years ago, I would say the opportunity was really on doing that, on doing the development of new infrastructure to the region. That is why we have equipped ourselves to be able to do that. Most recently, a few years ago, we saw an increase in opportunities of buying mature assets, where we also saw an edge of improving things. We got into credit for infrastructure, right? For now, still we see for the $6.7 billion AUM, about $6.2 billion is still development in our funds, development funds, now with the Development Fund 5. $500 million is spread across core and credit.
Okay. How big could core become and credits? Could they, do you see them one day being as big as development?
Yeah. Look, I think the potential is really big, Matt. I think as the market is evolving in the region, we are seeing more and more strategic players recycling their portfolios. We are seeing the privatization of bigger firms. We have built such a great and big platform of different assets in renewables, in telecommunications, in environmental services, in toll roads. I think at the moment, core, core plus, and credit are really a big opportunity. I think if you look into what has happened in recent years in the region, for instance, the largest privatizations of operational companies in energy or environmental services have happened in the region, right? You probably heard about Sabesp, which is the water and sanitation company of the state of São Paulo. This is a company valued at over $8 billion, right, in market cap. It was privatized in 2024.
The same for Eletrobras. It's one of the biggest power generation companies in the world. Equity value of over $12 billion. There are more platforms like that. Not as big, it's true, but there are many billion-dollar deals coming to the market. I think with all the knowledge we have from developing similar assets, I think we have a really good opportunity to tap more and more into core, core plus, and credit.
Okay. Maybe Matt just adds some industry color on that. One of the things you've seen at some of the U.S. alt managers is that they all started kind of with a traditional fund, but then they've expanded into core and core plus. At a very simple level, if you develop an asset and it's good and you've de-risked it, the return profile changes, but why do you want to sell that asset, right? You want to have another home where you can place that with usually a different set of investors, but it makes sense since you operate it, you know it. I would point out that our core strategy right now in Brazil is actually a listed product. It's actually quasi-permanent capital right now.
As we look out in the future, we think there's, as Roberto mentioned, a lot of interesting opportunity to put those into very long duration structures.
Okay, interesting. All right. You could actually hold on to some of your development assets longer as well. That's interesting. The data center business, you've recently announced this, it's called Omnia, right? The new data center platform. Where does that fit? Is that also in, that's a development business, right?
Yes. So that's starting our development fund, right? We like to repeat the businesses we like, right? We did a lot of toll roads and we exited some toll roads. Now we are doing more toll roads. We did a lot of telecom towers. We sold it twice and now we're doing again. A couple of years ago, we sold our first data center platform. It was a company called OData, where we made over four times the money in our investment with a very good IRR. Of course, I know the audience here knows that, but AI is really transforming this industry and the demand for data centers is really growing dramatically. We decided to launch this new platform we called Omnia.
It's going to be a platform within the Development Fund 5, but as the demand is so big and it's starting big with over 100 MW in IT capacity, we are bringing co-investors with us in that investment. I think this is going to be something that will start with something around $1 billion of commitment, which is really big. I think there's space for more, right? Because Brazil, maybe some people don't know that, but we have a lot of renewable energy available here, like solar, wind, cheap, and renewable available in many parts of the country. We have available land in strategic locations. We have fiber optics connecting the northeast of Brazil to Europe, to the U.S., and to many other parts of the world. It's a region without big geopolitical risks. It's almost no risk, right?
I mean, there's no conflicts, there's no wars or anything like that. It is a very interesting situation where, especially for AI, we can be a big hub offering data centers for big clients in many parts of the world. It is something that is starting here in fund 5, bringing co-investors with us. As this is something that is going to grow a lot, I mean, maybe there's a chance to have an independent vertical later or something that will start as an investment of the fund, but that could be much bigger than that.
Okay. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, I want to come back to that. That's obviously a super hot sector and probably a big opportunity. More generally, Roberto, when we look at the business, the key is whenever people talk about infrastructure, in my experience, they'll say, "We need this much infrastructure in the Middle East or Africa," or wherever. It's these trillion-dollar numbers that are hard to really wrap your head around. The number is always huge. I guess it's really about what positions Patria to win that. I was keen to understand more about starting with the team. What is the infrastructure you guys have in place? Why should global allocators, would they be giving their AUM to Patria and not someone else? Therefore, that eventually flow to shareholders as FRE?
Sure. Thanks for the question. Look, first of all, let me tell you about the team here, right? I mean, we have the largest dedicated investment team dedicated to infrastructure in the region. We currently have 85 professionals that are only doing infrastructure. They are organized into verticals. That's something we can only do if we have scale, right? I mean, 15-20 years ago when we started, we had a small team of known specialists that would do energy, logistics, environmental services. Now we have teams that are specialized in logistics and transportation, toll roads, telecommunications, environmental services, energy. And these people, as they're only covering their own industries, they have very good knowledge about what's going on in the market. They have their relationships. They have knowledge about the projects, and they keep reassessing the projects. So it's really a big and specialized team of investment professionals.
In this practice, we have seven partners that have been working together for over 15 years developing infrastructure in Latin. So a lot of experience within the firm and within the partners. We also have our value creation team with 40+ professionals that we actually share with the private equity group. In that group of people, we have a lot of engineers. We have strategic procurement people. We have legal. We have regulatory specialists, HR, compliance, all of that, kind of assessing the entire portfolio and bringing the knowledge that we have in our portfolios to Patria, right? It is a lot of people, very experienced people, and also very well aligned with our investors, right? I mean, because of the way you compensate them, because of the way we retain them.
It's really like the only team with that amount of experience and that depth of experience developing assets and infrastructure in the region.
Would the only kind of comparable teams or institutions be what, strategics, no other PE firms or financial sponsors?
Yeah. Most of the time, Matt, when we are going for an auction or we're going over a bilateral conversation to buy a company, I mean, most of the time we're competing with strategic players. I mean, the last three or four auctions that we participated in toll roads, for instance, it was only strategic players on the other side of the table. For energy, most of the time you're talking about strategic players. Sometimes you see some financial players, but what they're going to do is they're going to be partnering with a construction company or another strategic player, and they'll try to transfer the risk to them, right? That makes the entire structure and the strategy at least less competitive. The way we do it is we really like, we have the engineers, we have the technical team, we have the technical capabilities.
We take the same risks as a strategic player would do. With that, we are more competitive, and we are also more able to adjust and adapt if something goes wrong throughout the road, right? If there's a problem, we have the capability to solve it. I think that's a big competitive advantage for us.
Okay. That's interesting. Yeah. If I had to put my cynic hat on to challenge you on this a bit, it would be that private equity firms all talk about value creation and value creation teams, operations teams, and it's often unclear how real that is. Do you have examples we could talk about? Maybe something that's gone well, something that's not gone well, but what the Patria team did or how it's been able to move the needle on infrastructure investments?
Sure. Sure. First of all, let me give you a sense of what we operate here in terms of the size of the portfolio, because maybe there is a lot of value creation going on also because of what we have or we manage here, right? Of course, we have been investing and managing and selling a lot of companies. We have given a lot of money back to our investors. As our funds have been growing, the size of our portfolio is also really, really big at the moment. If you look into only the development strategy where we are in the Fund 5 and still have some companies for Fund 3 and 4, we currently manage 18 companies. Eighteen companies. This is over 18,000 employees. This year is going to be over $1 billion of EBITDA. That is the budget that we have for the year.
Every year we are deploying CapEx to the region, right? Over $1 billion of CapEx to the region. This year is actually a big year. We are doing even more than that. What we typically do to manage those companies is we are really close to the companies. We're not sitting in the boards of the portfolio companies and kind of monitoring what's going on every month, right? We are really there visiting them, talking to them weekly. My job here as a Partner of the firm is 100% dedicated to the portfolio company. I'm talking to the CEOs, I'm talking to the operating partners, I'm talking to the value creation experts on a day-to-day basis. What we do is really like we do a lot of operational benchmarking throughout the portfolio and with other companies, with our competitors.
We try to make sure that when we're looking to SG&A, OPEX, CapEx, we want to make sure we are the most efficient player in the industry. I mean, our returns have to be higher than the strategic players, and they are our competitors, right? We're looking to our portfolio. We have to be more efficient. If we're not more efficient, we are not winning new projects, we are not growing, and we are not delivering the results. The first thing we do is really to make sure people in our firms understand that we need to be the most efficient players in the market. We use a lot of KPIs and benchmarking to make sure we have that.
If you take, for instance, toll roads as an example, I mean, we're now delivering 15%-20% less OPEX than what we had in our investment committees. So we were approved higher OPEX, and we're now delivering 15%-20% less because we have been doing a lot of that. We use a lot of innovation, and we help the companies do that and create that culture whenever we think there's an opportunity to internalize something, for instance, and help the companies do that. We do it. Another example in toll roads, for instance, green conservation is one of the largest OPEX that these companies have, right? It's like cutting the grass and the trees, right? This is really big for toll roads. Most people do not know that.
When we first got into that industry, we used to hire local companies that were very inefficient. They would have old equipment. They would not use geolocalization to make sure that the people were going to the right places at the right time, that the equipment was being used properly, the tractors and things like that. Fuel consumption was high. They were using more people than needed. There were taxes that we had to pay because we were hiring third parties. When we decided to internalize that, it was like, I mean, now we manage 4,000 kilometers of toll roads in Brazil. I say we had to hire like 2,000 people to start with. As we were gaining efficiency via technology, via using more equipment and less people, we have managed to reduce that cost by 15%.
That's the culture we try to implement and use in the portfolio companies to make people see how competitors and the companies are doing things for many years and try to see another way of doing it in a way that we can save some money. We can be more efficient. That's good for ESG standards. That's good for our investors. That's good for us because it makes us more competitive in future auctions. There are a lot of examples. I could stay here like talking for hours. For instance, strategic procurement, right? I mean, we have 18 companies in the infrastructure portfolio. We have 20+ companies in the private equity portfolio. There are a lot of things that we have to buy for all the companies, right? We have a strategic procurement team here within Patria that does that for the entire portfolio.
With that, we have also managed to save millions of dollars in recent years because when you go to service providers, telecommunication companies, even lawyers, and you say, "Look, that's the amount of money we are spending with you or with you and your competitors. If we consolidate that to one service provider, how much can we reduce the cost, right?" We have been doing that every single year. We find a new opportunity to go over something like that. That is helping our companies a lot. It is helping a lot. There is more. Maybe throughout the conversation here, I could give you more examples. We go.
Yeah. Is there any situation where you've had a problem, like a problem portfolio company that you guys have managed to turn it around or that like this? Because it sounds like it's pretty convincing that you've probably got the biggest long-term investment in team and competency in Brazil, if not in Latin America when it comes to infrastructure. Are there any situations where that's kind of bailed you out with problematic investments?
Sure. No, look, doing developing new infrastructure, it's a complex business, right? I mean, there's a lot of things that could go wrong. I think, first of all, you have to prepare a lot before you get into a new project, before you start really to commit capital to something like what we do. Typically, we are going to be studying an M&A or an acquisition or an auction of a new development of infrastructure for two or three years. We do a lot of preparations so as to make sure the assumptions we get for a certain asset are really well structured and reliable, right? I mean, in our business, you don't want to be too optimistic or too because if you're too conservative, you're never going to win auctions with big companies, right? There's no deal if you're too conservative.
If you're too optimistic, you're going to win, but you're going to lose money, right? I like to say that we have to be close to the truth. The closer to the truth, the better, right? There were situations where this mindset and this team has helped us improve returns and also has helped us save returns or preserve value, right? Maybe I could give you two examples, quick examples here so as to show you, and not only about value creation, but also about how value creation interacts with investment teams to find the good timing and good opportunities. For instance, Argo, one of our energy investment transmission lines that we did a few years ago. I mean, typically, transmission lines are going to be low-return, considered low-return, low-risk investments, right? I mean, construction is not so complicated.
Usually, you have, of course, you have environmental licensing and permits that can be a little bit more tricky. But typically, if you have the experience doing that, you're going to be able to deliver the asset, right? Typically, it's going to be low returns. In that case of Argo, there was a period of time in Brazil where the president was going through an impeachment process. Many strategic players were kind of cautious about coming to Brazil, and they were not taking a long-term view into what was going to happen like a few years later, right? We have managed to get into an auction with minimal competition. Actually, the biggest asset we won at that time, there was zero competition. Of course, we have managed to go with conservative assumptions for our business plan.
I think it's interesting when I talk about the mindset, right? It's not because the assumptions were conservative that we decided to go and accommodate ourselves and say, "Oh, 20% is fine. We are good. There's nothing we should do. Let's just do what we said we would do," right? In our case, the mindset is really the owner mindset, right? The team was like, "You know what? We think we have more than enough time to build that transmission line. Let's try to optimize things. Let's try to expedite licensing, expropriations, engineering projects, and let's try to anticipate the construction." We have managed to do that by over 12 months. That means we were getting more revenues. We were anticipating revenues.
You mean you did your development period in 12 months faster than you initially underwrote?
Yeah. The COD was actually over 12 months faster than the underwriting case in the investment committee. And with that, we did like four times our money in a transmission line. It's very rare for people to be able to do that. I'm just saying a case where everything was going right. We would make the money we said we were going to make. The investment committee was happy. Investors were happy. Our team was happy. Instead of just waiting for the final COD, people were always thinking about how we can improve returns, even if it's a company that is doing well. That's our team mindset. Of course, there's cases where we saw big challenges. If we were to stay still and do nothing, returns would be not so good. I think toll roads is a good example.
We have grown a lot in toll roads. We have just completed the sale of one of our toll roads to Vinci and to GIC. We have actually completed the sale of the control to Vinci, and now GIC is buying the remaining shares that we own. That company, it's a business that started really well. When you talk about toll roads, you're doing a lot of derisking, right? First, you have to do the traffic derisking, CapEx derisking, funding derisking, Opex derisking. In the case of Entrevias, everything was going well in the beginning. Traffic was fine. We did a very attractive leverage with BNDES. Opex, as I've mentioned, was going a little bit below budget, which was really good.
During COVID, actually, there was a big issue for many construction things, not only toll roads, but there was a big inflation of CapEx that was much bigger than the indexation that we have for the tariffs. That means CapEx was growing stronger, the cost, than the EBITDA, right? Because there was a mismatch between the CapEx index and the tariff index. This is the type of situation where, I mean, when you're analyzing the project, it's very hard for you to anticipate that, right? Historically, both inflations were growing at the same pace, right? Because of COVID, asphalt was very expensive. Cement was very expensive. Employees became more expensive. Everything became more expensive. What we did was we decided to put the entire team together, value creation team, the CEOs, the engineering directors of our companies.
We also have Chief Transformation Officers in our companies, typically people that come from Patria as a secondment and help us analyze the business plan of these companies to see value levers that we can use. In that case, we did a lot. It was a number of initiatives that made us, in the end, be very close to the original CapEx that we approved in our investment committee. Just for reference, CapEx inflation was above 50%. Tariff inflation was around 20%. The difference was around 30%. We have managed to be practically on budget. What we did, we saw that we could import asphalt. Brazil is self-sustainable in asphalt. You buy it straight from Petrobras. We saw that there was a mismatch of price importing asphalt from other countries. We did a lot. We brought a lot of asphalt from other countries.
We decided to build our own asphalt plants. We saw that some local construction companies were using the fact that they had their asphalt plants to kind of block the entrance of other players. We were in the hands of one or two construction companies. We saw that, and we realized we have to own our own asphalt plants. With that, we have also managed to do more recycling of asphalt. Some of our team went to Europe, and they saw that in some places, actually 60%-70% of the asphalt is actually recycled. In Brazil, it was zero. Because we brought the most modern asphalt plants for our operations, we are now recycling 25%-30% of the asphalt that we use.
It's a constant discussion in the portfolio companies of how we can improve things and how we can challenge things in order to kind of seek ways to improve efficiency. We do that in a very also conservative way. The size of the total business, for instance, that we have, we could have like four or five asphalt plants, right? What we did is let's start with one. Let's do a POC, like a proof of concept. If it's really that it's going to yield a big return and it's going to reduce costs dramatically, then we go for the three or four asphalt plants. We did that in Brazil. It's very successful. Now we're taking that to Colombia, where we also own three toll road concessions.
The asphalt plant that you built, did you then sell that when you sold Entrevias? Is that part of the company? Are you about to launch your asphalt vertical?
No, no, no. No, actually, so what we have is these plants that we have, they actually work for the entire portfolio, right? For now, we are keeping them, and the new buyer may either hire us to supply the asphalt. That's not going to be a new vertical. It's going to be like a reduction of costs for the other portfolio companies, right? The margin that you would get. Or they can build their own asphalt strategy. It's something you're going to see. For now, we are keeping the assets for us because the demand we have for our companies in the 30-year concession that we have, we are going to maintain. In the future, if we sell these companies as a platform, it's probably going to go with them. If we sell them separately, then we're going to have to figure out where it's going.
It's not a big investment. We are doing like billions of Brazilian Real of pavement recovery, duplications, etc. An asphalt plant is like $5 million. It is something that can change the business materially, but it is not a material CapEx investment. It is more an operational challenge than the availability of capital, so.
Roberto, all this work you guys are doing, to tie it back to what matters for shareholders, does this help you raise money for infrastructure? To prospective LPs, I know you guys recently did a big SMA with, I think, a Middle Eastern investor. Does this help? Or maybe it was Asian. Is this a topic? Do they ask about this kind of stuff? Do they spend a lot of time on the team? Does this move the needle for them?
Yes. Yes. Look, it's very interesting because many of these investors that are going, that they came for fund two, three, four, they now do co-investments with us. They invest directly in some of our assets. For instance, this is public information for toll roads. We have two other LPs that are very big and always invest with us. They do something that is not typical at all. They actually prepare with us for the auctions. Even if we do not have the asset yet, they are working with us to prepare for the auction, and then they bid with us. They sit in the boards. The reason why they keep coming to new funds is the fact that they actually know these teams. They know our CEOs. They know our CFOs.
They know how we manage these companies, how we create value, what the value creation teams are doing. They are happy about it. They are very happy about it. It is a very close relationship with many of these LPs. They are investing in the funds, but they are also investing a lot directly into the portfolio companies and to the platforms. I think that makes a big difference for them.
Okay. Hey, guys, if I can maybe have a.
I'll grab the opportunities.
Yeah, Rob, go for it.
I was going to actually, that was one of the questions that was here. I mean, we talked about the potential opportunity set in the region over the coming years. Maybe it would be helpful, how do we as a firm kind of manage that, narrow it down, figure out what do we want to go after a bit after or not? If you could talk a little bit about how we become more selective and our process.
Yeah. If we could do that, Roberto, if you could tie that into a bit with this Brazil privatization program, because it's new to me how big it is. Some of the numbers I've seen are pretty enormous. Yeah, if you could maybe answer that question, but also how you work the funnel on these privatization programs.
Sure. Sure. Great. First of all, it's really big. It's actually a lot of verticals actually have a lot of things going on. It's not only privatizations, let's say, but new concessions, M&A, and a lot of recycling of capital in strategic players where we see opportunities to maybe get into companies and improve their results. Maybe first, like the question that Rob asked about how we've narrowed down the pipeline. I think because we have this big team, we have the ability to kind of monitor all the sectors very closely, right? I mean, Latin America is a big continent with different cultures, with different geopolitical aspects, and different economies, right? In the same continent, we have Argentina, we have Brazil, we have Colombia, we have Venezuela, and Panama, right?
You cannot go do and even in Brazil, you have São Paulo State and you have Rio de Janeiro State. Totally different places and with different regulations, different rule of law, different politics, and macro stability. What we do is we try to select places where we see strong regulation, rule of law for many years, right? I mean, we see what has going on in that market and if contracts are being respected or not, if regulatory agents are good and technical, right? That's really important for us. We see if the projects are bankable, if there's incentivized debt, if there's a development bank, if it's going to be local banks. Typically, if it's a concession or a privatization, we interact a lot with the government.
Typically, you have IFC hired to help the governments with these projects, or you have BNDES, our National Development Bank, also hired. They come to the market, ask for our opinion in the projects. We give them feedback. It is a long-term process to make sure these projects are feasible and that they have a good risk matrix, let's say. Whenever we find that the project is feasible and good and the risks are controlled, we do a deep dive. You have mentioned that people say it is a $400 billion opportunity, right? We typically look into everything, but not in the deep way. We go, and based on these things that I said, we select the ones that we want to do the deep dive. We do a deep dive and we hire third parties.
We bring the team before buying the companies or before the auctions. That's what we did with Omnia, for instance. We are not constructing. We're not building anything yet. We are preparing for it. We still haven't closed the first client. We are preparing for it, but we already have the entire team in place. The team is there. That's pretty much how we go about it. When we talk about the size of the opportunity, I think, first of all, I think we are becoming a global leader in privatizations, right? My team came up with a number these days saying that for the last three years, we have like 30-something % of the global volume of privatizations in the entire world, right?
That's Latin America. Brazil?
Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Wow. So a third of global privatization volume is in your region?
Yes. For the last three years, right?
The last three years. Okay.
Yes. When we look forward, in all the verticals that we cover, we see opportunities. There is a big number of transmission line auctions coming to the market, over 30,000 km that will be considered to the private initiative. Of course, there are a lot of strategic players looking into that, but 30,000 km is a lot, right? Talking about CapEx, that could go over $10 billion-$20 billion. When you look into sanitation, there was a big change in regulation a few years ago. Now you have universalization targets for state governments and municipalities. Governments have to act. They cannot stay still without offering water and sewage for the population. There are 11 auctions scheduled for the next 24 months. That is not like a five-year. For the next 24 months, we are expecting 10-11 projects to come to the market. That is another $10 billion of CapEx for sanitation.
The same for toll roads. We have one of the largest toll road programs in Brazil in the world also. There are 5,000 kilometers of toll roads being auctioned in the next 24 months. These are projects with names, locations. Sometimes it is actually a re-auction. It is a toll road that was conceded 25, 30 years ago. This concession is getting to an end, and it is coming back to the market again. It is a really interesting risk matrix here, risk return profile, because traffic is known. It has a very long-term history of traffic. You are not building new stretches of road. There is no competition with other roads. It is an existing road with existing traffic. What you have to do is expansions, pavement recovery, and things like that. Our team, because we have such a big toll road platform, they know every single project. They try to.
You have your asphalt plant to provide the asphalt.
We have the asphalt plants. We have the benchmarks for what we're doing in order to be more assertive, right? We don't have to rely on a third-party specialist to come and tell us how much it's going to cost to duplicate a kilometer of a road because we are doing that at this right moment. We can actually talk to our engineers, to our teams, understand what are the challenges they're facing. We use these as an assumption to our business plans, exactly like the strategic player does, right? I mean, of course, we use the third parties and the external advisors. It is on top of. It is not that we are only relying on them in order to get the assumptions right. Our teams are doing that. Look, I know.
Let me just make sure I got that right, Roberto. You say this seems pretty near-term. You're saying all within the next 24 months, up to $20 billion of grid auctions, $10 billion of sanitation. I don't know how many billions of dollars 5,000 km of toll roads is, but I assume it's a pretty big number.
Yeah, no. In equity, we think for us, we are seeing a billion dollars of equity check for us, not what we could get. Typically, one project is going to be $200 million of equity check. A typical project is like 500 km. Talking about 10 projects, if we get three, and we are very high.
This is just the toll roads.
Just the toll roads.
Okay. Then there is the other stuff as well. This is what I find interesting because I think you said in the past, you are aspiring to kind of private equity style returns on these investments, right? Let's say you managed to achieve that just on the $1 billion of equity that you put into, let's say, toll road projects. Let's say you do a 2X on that with some co-invest. Maybe your blended carry percentage is going to be lower than 20%. Even if it is 15%, that is $150 million of carry. You guys are guiding for the whole of Patria about $150 million of carry over the next three years. One of these infrastructure verticals could return the entire carry guidance.
I understand that won't all happen in the next three years, but it just seems to me like infrastructure alone can deliver a lot more than that.
Yeah. I mean, over, I could just real quickly put some perspective. Certainly over time, yes. It is important to remember we use a European waterfall as opposed to an American waterfall.
Yeah. Understood. It'll be delayed.
Kind of pushes it out. Actually, that's a more conservative way of realizing carry compared to, say, an American waterfall. Even though it delays our recognition, it also reduces our risk of clawback and whatnot. Actually, when you do realize it, it puts more certainty into that realization over time.
Yeah. I want to make sure we touch on the data centers as well because you're launching this new platform, and you were saying earlier you did a 4X the last time with OData. Is this a similar team? You have the team in place. You feel like you have the expertise in place. You can try and do something as big as OData again, not necessarily in the multiple but in the capital deployment?
Yeah. No, look, one of the beauties about having this value creation team and having our own engineering capabilities and teams that are kind of monitoring and helping all the portfolio companies is the fact that we keep the knowledge that we develop in the companies and the platforms here within Patria, right? The team, in the case of Omnia, we brought a CEO that is very knowledgeable about the industry. He was the CEO of two of the largest telecommunication companies in Brazil, a company called TIM and another company called Oi. He worked for Cisco. He was the CEO for Cisco in the region for many years. He used to work for us for a few years while we were developing the Odata platform with another team. A few people from his team actually helped.
The people that we are seconding to Omnia, a lot of them helped develop OData. We have a Senior Director who at the time was a VP and helped us approve the investment and sell the investment. He's now the CFO of Omnia. We have people in engineering, FP&A, legal that also came from OData. I think when you talk about our value creation team, our engineers, they have the references, the data from the time while we were building those data centers with our previous platform, right? When you talk about size, of course, I mean, we can never promise returns, right? Some investments are going to be a little better, others a little worse. Typically, you want to have stable returns around private equity returns, right, in U.S. dollars. We have been delivering that.
In the case of Omnia, we are starting bigger than OData already because the market has changed dramatically. The data centers that we are targeting now are bigger. I think the opportunity to apply much more capital than in the past. Of course, we are conservative people, and we like to start. What we're going to do is we're going to do the first asset. We're going to find the client, right? It's going well. We have some locations. We are going to secure locations, secure the permits, all the engineering, all the funding. We're going to put the equity for the first project. As we perform the first project, we decide to do more. That's exactly what we do in most of the things we do. We started with one toll road. It did well. We do more. We do more in Brazil.
When we are comfortable about doing that in Brazil and think the returns are good, we go to other places. We go to Colombia. We go to Chile. We go to Peru. Data centers is kind of the same approach. We have to be conservative. I mean, we have to make sure we're not losing money. Good returns, but never losing money. We keep doing that in a conservative way to make sure returns are fine and everybody's happy.
Hey, guys, we're just about at the hour mark. This has been great. Matt, I don't know if you have any one last question you want to.
Yeah, one more. Just on the data center opportunity, obviously, you can see how it could be really big. What financially do those projects look like? Are the tenants hyperscalers and global names people would be familiar with? Can you get dollar leases on these?
Yes. Yes. There are a bunch of projects where we can get some dollar revenues in the region, especially for data centers nowadays. These are global clients, hyperscalers. And these are going to be dollar-denominated companies, let's say, which is also good for us. Most of our peers come from this. This is something that we have always tried to have.
Interesting. Cool.
Great. Guys, this has been great. Really appreciate it. We used the full hour. Thank you. Matt, thank you so much for doing this and preparing and answering the questions. Roberto, really appreciate your time. For anyone who dialed in or Zoomed in, thank you for participating. This will be posted on our website in a few days if you want to revisit it. Of course, if anyone has follow-up questions, please feel free to reach out to myself or Andre Medina in shareholder relations. We are happy to answer them. If necessary, we will direct you to the right person within Patria to help get your questions answered. With that, guys, thanks again for taking the time. Super helpful, super interesting. Everyone who is out there dialed in, thanks for taking the time out of your busy day and participating. Have a great day.
Thank you. Thanks, Robert. Bye.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.