Private Markets
Project Finance & Infrastructure
Private markets are providing new forms of long-term financing for industrial and infrastructure projects—offering solutions for the energy transition and technological revolution, and making a transformational impact on millions of people.
Overview
Private markets are actively contributing to the supply of capital funding the infrastructure projects of the future, today.
Private markets are providing new sources of long-term financing for industrial and infrastructure projects through corporate and project-level debt raisings. Project finance is typically used to fund the construction and operation of capital-intensive assets—spanning solar and wind farms, stadiums, highways, datacenters, and beyond. Debt is serviced from cash flows generated from the completed projects and secured by collateral that can include project assets, strong covenant packages, and guarantees.
Private markets participants are increasingly investing in project finance due to its tendency to feature higher debt leverage than corporates with the same rating level, and the overall credit resilience and growth prospects of infrastructure. At the same time, project finance issuers are expanding their funding sources into private credit, private equity, and private placements markets. These markets are used as a mechanism to diversify funding sources, extend tenor, and manage the costs and dependencies of funding from traditional bank debt due to risk-based pricing, capital considerations, and regulations.
S&P Global Ratings’ portfolio of 325 ratings on project finance issuers (of which 260 are public) is mainly composed of transactions in the power and energy, social infrastructure, and transportation sectors—with a smaller number of deals involving oil and gas, industrial, digital, and natural resource or mining transactions. The majority, or 70%, of project finance credit ratings are investment grade, defined as 'BBB-' and higher.
Market Insights
Industry Report Card
Project Finance Sector Resilient Amid Challenges
Our project finance portfolio continues to showcase resilience in a highly dynamic landscape fraught with challenges, including an unpredictable tariff environment and geopolitical turmoil. Infrastructure is essential in long-term global development and is often financed through project finance.
Our predominantly investment-grade portfolio reflects the strength of this sector, which, as of June 19, 2025, included 285 project finance issuers across the U.S., Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific. Notably, this total reflects a shift from previous years, as it now consists solely of global-scale ratings, excluding national scale ratings. Of these issuers, 220 are publicly rated.
Data centers provide the backbone of the digital economy and are on the verge of unprecedented growth, driven by the exponential increase in data generation from artificial intelligence, cloud computing, remote work, and digital devices.
Historically, data centers have been primarily financed through the unrated bank loan market and refinanced in the asset-backed securities (ABS) market. As traditional funding sources may struggle to keep pace with the demand in this sector, there is a notable shift toward other structures that accommodate the evolving investment landscape—and investors are increasingly utilizing innovative structures, particularly project finance and including back-levered joint venture financings.
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