Partner & Co-President, Ares Management Corporation
Co-President Blair Jacobson on Digital Infra, EU Private Markets and Ares' Longstanding Partnerships
Co-President Blair Jacobson joined Ares’ Perspectives video series by highlighting the origins of Ares’ business in Europe, New Economy sectors of interest for Ares—including data centers and other digital infrastructure opportunities—and the firm’s commitment to our collaborative culture and deep, longstanding relationships with investors.
More from Blair and Ares’ senior leadership team here: https://www.aresmgmt.com/news-views/p...
About Blair Jacobson
Blair Jacobson, co-president of Ares Management, discussed private markets in two media appearances in June 2026. At SuperReturn International, he described a "disconnect between market anxiety and the fundamental performance" he is seeing, stating that portfolio companies are growing 8 to 12% per year and that non-accrual rates are lower than historical averages. He called AI-driven infrastructure investment a "supercycle megatrend of our lifetimes," citing a projected $2 trillion opportunity over five years to build data centers and $1.5 trillion to power them. Jacobson also noted that Ares is increasing its market share as fundraising concentrates among larger managers. In a Bloomberg interview, Jacobson said that most companies prefer to remain private due to the availability of capital from private equity, credit, and infrastructure sources. He pointed to a trend of declining public company listings and stated that institutions continue to back private funds because they need asset returns to meet growing liabilities. Jacobson reported that Ares had record fundraising for two consecutive years and expected another record in 2026.
Transcript (17 segments)
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Blair Jacobson0:00
So I'm in year number 14 at Ares. When I joined, I joined our European direct lending business. We had about a billion of assets, then maybe around 20 people. I helped grow that business with Mike Dennis, Matthewis, and the team. Now we have about 80 billion of assets, 100 investment professionals across seven offices. Earlier this year, I was elevated to become co-president of the company alongside my partner Kip Deve, helping give our CEO Mike Aragetti some operating leverage to help manage the day-to-day investment operations, middle office and back office of the firm.
So, I was always that kid who was very interested in business. I would read the stock pages in the newspaper. I had many entrepreneurial businesses as a kid as well. My first job out of undergraduate, I was on Wall Street. I worked at a firm called Ker Peabody in their mergers and acquisitions department. At the time, I didn't know that much about finance. I didn't know much about accounting. However, there was a guy a year ahead of me in my team who'd helped mentor me and got me where I am today. And that was Mike Aragetti. That's what launched me into my career in finance.
Ares started its European direct lending business in 2007. Ares had a really good successful blueprint that they use in the United States. They brought it over to Europe and really strongly believed that that could work. However, at the time the business was dominated by commercial banks. Then the great financial crisis happened that changed the banking market forever. In subsequent, not only did banks retrench and go out of business, but banks that survived became more highly regulated. So, writing these types of loans and investments that we would do in direct lending became less attractive for banks and more attractive for firms like Ares. The market really started to take off in 2012, 2013, but Ares already had a five or six-year head start, which really helped us succeed in the market.
Ares is really good at origination. What that means is we have hundreds of people around the world finding thousands and thousands of companies for us to look at and evaluate every year. I get excited when I find a great company that has good growth characteristics, generates a lot of cash and has a very, very strong competitive moat in its industry which means it's going to thrive for a very, very long time.
I would say for me partnership is based on mutual trust and mutual respect where you work to accomplish a shared vision of shared goals. What's interesting about partnership is that it's got to work in good times and in challenging times and often times partnerships get stronger when things are very, very difficult. I think at Ares we form great partnerships. We form partnerships with our colleagues at work. We form partnerships with our stakeholders that could be portfolio companies as well as our limited partner investors.
One of the greatest things about partnership is that you can move forward and advance together to achieve a common goal. So at Ares, we have people working at the firm, whether it's in the investment groups, the client service groups, the support functions that are always thinking about ways to do things better. We like to challenge existing norms and do things that deliver much better results over time for our clients through being highly innovative. One of the great things about Ares is collaboration is built into our culture. We speak to each other across geographies, across teams, across business lines so that we can really have each and every idea percolate to the top and get better.
I believe one of the best things that Ares does to conduct business is having a very, very strong investment committee culture. Our investment committees are fully transparent. The entire investment team of any given business gets every investment committee memorandum. They're all invited to participate in the investment committee meeting so they can hear the process, hear the questions, but also add their own perspectives to help make a better decision.
My view is that to become a good investor, you need to see a lot of transactions, ones that are consummated and sometimes ones that aren't. So by seeing more deals at investment committee, if you're a junior person, for example, you get to see each and every deal. That's what helps you develop pattern recognition. That's what helps you become a great investor.
The democratization of alternatives has always been core to the Ares philosophy. In fact, one of our first ever credit products was a publicly traded BDC that was available for retail investors to buy. So again, democratization has always been in our sights. And it's very gratifying now to see alternative investment products being made available to a wider variety, a larger audience who are interested in the long-term appreciation potential as well as the durable yield offered by alternatives.
One of the great things about the GCP acquisition is that we were able to fold into Ares a team of around 80 dedicated technologists as part of ADA infrastructure. The team came largely from hyperscalers, the clients of digital infrastructure businesses. They came from the likes of Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon Web Services. And having that expertise internally is something that Ares didn't have before. And not only are we using it to help build data centers for clients, but it's benefiting so many different parts of Ares to become smarter and more efficient in our own knowledge about AI development.
In my view, Ares wanted to partner with GCP for three reasons. The first, it helped double the size of our real estate business, giving it more scale and geographic scope. Secondly, it helped us expand in Asia, in particular in Japan. Historically, we'd had distribution in Japan. Now, we've added a world-class logistics investment business in Japan. And last, when we think about the future, GCP added digital infrastructure development capabilities to Ares. They have a team that develops data centers really from the beginning. They find land, they get the permitting, they sign leases, they get the energy and power and build and develop. And that was a new capability for Ares.
Data centers are the heart and soul of so much of what's going on around us in the world today. Whether it's cloud technology, whether it's AI development, whether it's music streaming services, film streaming services, whether it's digital payments, whether it's storage of data, data centers facilitate all of those activities. And when we look at the underlying statistics, usage is only growing in time. And that's why Ares thinks this is such an attractive area for investment.
We're incredibly excited about growth in infrastructure. It covers so many different areas from mobility and transport to energy transition to digital infrastructure. And digital infrastructure can mean everything from fiber to tower to cell networks and of course data centers. We believe there needs to be trillions of dollars spent every year to fulfill infrastructure demand and Ares will play a major role in the development of that industry.
Private credit refers to loans that are generated outside of the banking system. They tend to be bilateral relationships between an institutional asset manager like Ares and the company. There doesn't need to be anybody in the middle arranging the transaction or underwriting the transaction. We take care of all of that at Ares and that sector has grown dramatically over the past several years. We've seen the growth from institutions who view that capital as being more available than perhaps speaking to their local bank where regulations make it more challenging for banks to make those loans. However, we're also seeing our own investors and stakeholders at Ares interested in funding these types of transactions. That can be pension plans, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, even wealth investors who view the risk adjusted return of private credit to be very, very attractive in addition to the yield that's paid on those types of loans on a very, very frequent basis.
In our view at Ares, we've been in the private credit space for decades. So, in those several decades, we've seen cycles. We've seen recessions. We've seen the GFC, we've seen COVID, and many other instances that impact our portfolios. And in each one of those events, our portfolios have been tested and in our view have come out in a very, very solid way. So when I hear people say private credit hasn't been tested, I take the opposite view. I think it's been tested and it's done very, very well over time.
In my view, the term shadow banking is a bit of a misnomer. For example, when we think about some of the typical concerns around the banking sector and compare those to private credit loans and loan managers, I'd say first the types of loans that we make are senior secured. We make those loans on behalf of very, very sophisticated long-term investors. When you compare that to a bank that tends to make those loans using consumer deposits and those deposits are guaranteed by the government, the structure of the private credit industry works very, very differently. In addition, bank balance sheets tend to be highly levered, sometimes up to 10 to one. Whereas private credit balance sheets, sometimes they're unlevered, sometimes they're levered maybe one or one and a quarter to one. So again, the risk profile I think is very different when you look at the banking sector versus private credit investors.
Lastly, when we think about transparency, the amount of information that we receive from our borrowers and that we then synthesize and send to our stakeholders is the opposite of not transparent. We report all the key metrics, all the key KPIs in a very, very transparent way to our stakeholders. So in our view it's the opposite.