Over the past year, Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, the world’s largest sovereign investor, has quietly been doing two things that, at first glance, appear contradictory. It has been trimming exposure to dollar-denominated bonds even as it redeploys those same dollars back into the United States.
The proceeds have gone not into Treasuries, but into ownership: renewable-energy infrastructure alongside Brookfield Asset Management, logistics real estate through funds managed by Blackstone, and direct stakes in U.S. commercial property.
The move captures a defining feature of what is often labeled de-dollarization. Capital is not fleeing America. It is changing form, swapping fixed financial claims on dollars for ownership of assets that generate cash flow and reprice with inflation.
“Real assets provide diversification,” explains Connor Teskey, CEO of Brookfield Asset Management. “They are less correlated to the traditional stocks and bonds that have made up financial portfolios, and provide stability in an increasingly volatile market.”
For advisers, the message is clear and increasingly acknowledged: As global institutions move away from holding financial claims toward owning real assets, portfolios concentrated in stocks and bonds risk lagging in real terms. Already, pension funds and family offices are increasing allocations to infrastructure and other real assets.
De-dollarization is often treated as a geopolitical slogan: Countries are “moving away from the dollar.” But some analysts question whether there is actually any attempt to dethrone the U.S. currency.
“There isn’t any real de-dollarization — that’s 100 percent fake news,” asserts Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former U.S. Treasury official who is a widely cited expert on global currency flows.
Others see something more nuanced. In their view, de-dollarization is unfolding in three layers.
The first is reserve composition. Central banks gradually reduce holdings of U.S. Treasuries and dollar cash, diversifying into other stores of value. This is the classic reserve currency story. India offers a recent example: The Reserve Bank of India has reduced dollar holdings to a five-year low while increasing gold reserves to record levels.
“Treasuries have lost much of their reputation for safety and aren’t appreciating in value,” notes a former deputy governor of India’s central bank. “But there is no single currency strong enough to substitute for the dollar, and gold supply is too inelastic — which is why you see its value rising so much.”
The second layer involves trade settlement. China has been expanding the use of its currency in cross-border commerce. The share of goods trades settled in yuan was 28 percent in 2025, up from 12 percent in 2018. Even so, the yuan remains the world’s fifth-most-traded currency and far from a reserve substitute.
“While there are no scalable alternatives to the dollar, the quest for payments autonomy is gaining traction, led by China,” writes Joyce Chang, J.P. Morgan’s chair of global research in a February report
The third layer of de-dollarization — more visible in markets — has less to do with currency reserves than with how capital is held.
Sovereign wealth funds, pensions, family offices, and foundations still hold dollars but increasingly avoid holding dollar claims. Bonds are giving way to utilities, pipelines, and logistics networks. Investors are moving away from returns locked in nominal dollars into assets whose income adjusts with inflation.
Much of the public debate focuses on the first two layers. But the third is where portfolios are changing.
Global investors aren’t trying to exit the dollar system. They are trying to escape monetary risk — the erosion of purchasing power embedded in fixed nominal claims — while retaining exposure to the world’s deepest capital markets.
And the United States still offers the largest supply of investable real assets, along with strong legal protections and deep pools of capital.
Owning a U.S. power grid or data center campus therefore isn’t viewed as “holding dollars,” even if the revenues are dollar-denominated. It is owning a claim on economic activity inside the dollar system, not on the currency itself.
That distinction explains why de-dollarization does not show up as capital flight from the United States. Instead, it appears as capital refusing to sit still.
Few firms sit more squarely at this intersection than the two alternative-asset giants, Blackstone and Brookfield. Between them, they manage $2.5 trillion in assets and hold some $300 billion in dry powder.
For Blackstone, logistics real estate has become one of the clearest examples of how global investors like Norway’s sovereign fund are shifting from financial assets toward ownership of physical systems underpinning modern commerce.
Nadeem Meghji, global head of the firm’s real estate business, describes the strategy as rooted in a simple observation: Warehouses are becoming indispensable infrastructure for the digital economy.
Blackstone, which began investing in warehouses in 2010, continued to expand aggressively in 2023 as rising interest rates rattled commercial real estate. As many investors pulled back, the firm moved to acquire high-quality warehouses at discounts to replacement cost, betting that underlying demand would outlast the downturn.
“At the end of the day, what was happening on the ground was that demand was continuing to grow because of e-commerce penetration,” says Meghji.
The numbers support that view. U.S. online sales roughly doubled between 2019 and 2025 as retailers and delivery companies shifted to same-day or next-day fulfillment. Last year alone, Amazon Prime delivered about eight billion items on that accelerated timetable, and Walmart’s online sales grew far faster than overall revenue. As delivery times shrink, warehouses must move closer to population centers, driving demand for distribution facilities near major cities.
At the same time, the prospect of a resurgence of domestic manufacturing has added another source of demand. The nearly $1 trillion in new U.S. industrial investment announced over the past several years will require a vast network of storage and logistics capacity. The construction boom around data centers and artificial intelligence infrastructure itself increases the need for nearby warehouse space to store equipment and materials.
These dynamics underpin Blackstone logistics platform Link Logistics, which manages more than 500 million square feet of distribution facilities across the Americas. Norway’s Government Pension Fund has committed $800 million to this Blackstone vehicle.
For such investors, the strategy offers something increasingly prized in a volatile financial environment: long-duration, inflation-linked assets with the potential for steady cash flow growth.
“It’s long-term compounding in a sector we believe in,” Meghji says.
Where Blackstone has focused on logistics warehouses as the backbone of modern commerce, Brookfield is pursuing a parallel strategy in the digital economy. To attract global investors seeking to increase their holdings of U.S. real assets, Brookfield is building “AI factories,” massive computing campuses designed to produce AI at industrial scale.
For Sikander Rashid, who heads the firm’s AI infrastructure strategy, the concept reflects the next phase in the evolution of data centers. Traditional facilities were designed to store and transmit information. Artificial intelligence factories, by contrast, are built to generate computing power on a scale never before required.
“The biggest bottleneck in AI today is not capital or advanced chips, it’s energy,” Rashid explains.
A conventional data center consumes tens of megawatts of electricity; the newest AI campuses can demand one gigawatt or more — enough instantaneous power to supply a city of several hundred thousand homes.
Brookfield recently signed a $5 billion framework agreement with Bloom Energy to deploy on-site power systems for large computing facilities. Such “behind the meter” generation allows data centers to produce electricity locally rather than relying solely on strained grid networks.
AI factories can cost up to three times as much as traditional data centers because they house massive clusters of graphics processing chips, or GPUs — the engines that train and run modern AI systems and devour those huge amounts of electricity.
The result is a new form of infrastructure that sits somewhere among energy networks, cloud computing, and industrial manufacturing. Brookfield views the facilities as infrastructure assets because they typically are backed by long-term contracts with technology companies, carry high barriers to entry, and produce steady yields once operational.
To finance the build-out, Brookfield is partnering with some of the world’s largest institutional investors. A cornerstone commitment has come from the Kuwait Investment Authority, which joined Brookfield and Nvidia as a founding partner in the firm’s global AI infrastructure initiative.
“KIA has the large-scale capital required for AI infrastructure,” says Rashid, noting that it can also help attract additional Middle East investors to the platform.
In the next two years, Brookfield will deploy $100 billion for AI factories, with more than half that capital to be invested in the U.S.
Industrywide, the company estimates that building the full AI infrastructure ecosystem — from chips to computing facilities to power generation — will require roughly $7 trillion in investment over the next decade.
Not every beneficiary of the shift toward real assets is a trillion-dollar alternative-assets behemoth. Firms with more-specialized platforms are also capturing foreign capital seeking exposure to physical infrastructure in the United States. One example is DigitalBridge Group, a midsize alternative-assets manager that manages roughly $108 billion of assets across data centers, fiber networks, and telecom towers, making it one of the largest dedicated investors in digital infrastructure.
“Why be a specialist?” DigitalBridge CEO Marc Ganzi asked last year in a speech to the Tech Capital International Finance Forum. “Infrastructure has outperformed the rest of the asset classes.”
The firm recently entered a new phase with its $4 billion acquisition by Tokyo-based SoftBank Group, a deal that is expected to receive regulatory approval later this year. The transaction reflects the efforts of SoftBank to deepen its presence in the physical systems required to train and run AI models, an area its founder Masayoshi Son sees as central to the next technology cycle.
For SoftBank, the acquisition provides something it previously lacked: a large operating platform that develops and manages the computing and connectivity infrastructure behind AI. DigitalBridge will continue to operate independently under Ganzi, and Softbank’s capital will help create a pipeline of projects and customers that could accelerate the growth of DigitalBridge’s infrastructure platforms.
DigitalBridge-backed developments now include multibillion-dollar data center campuses designed to support the rapid growth of AI computing, in states like Texas and Wisconsin.
The shift to real assets is also underway inside Europe. Institutional investors are reducing reliance on euro-denominated government bonds while increasing ownership of infrastructure and other real assets — a subtle form of what might be called de-euroization alongside de-dollarization.
For years, ultralow interest rates left many European sovereign bonds yielding less than inflation, creating a mismatch for pension funds and insurers that must meet long-term liabilities. The result has been a steady move to assets capable of generating durable cash flows tied to the real economy.
BNP Paribas Asset Management has built one of Europe’s largest real-assets platforms, focusing on sectors such as transportation networks, energy transition infrastructure, and social infrastructure across Europe and the U.S. The firm raises capital largely from pension funds, insurers, and sovereign investors.
According to Sandro Pierri, the chief executive of BNP Paribas Asset Management, these institutional clients increasingly want assets tied directly to economic activity rather than low-yielding sovereign debt. In March, in announcing plans to double pretax income by 2030, Pierri said the firm intended “to connect savers and investors with all the opportunities of the real economy.”
As the shift spreads through sovereign funds and pensions, it is reshaping decisions at the highest levels of private wealth.
Family offices — which manage the fortunes of some of the world’s wealthiest individuals — have been among the first to reallocate portfolios away from purely financial instruments to ownership of income-producing physical assets. The family offices' long time horizons and lack of short-term liquidity pressures allow them to pursue infrastructure, real estate, and logistics assets that generate steady cash flows over decades.
According to a 2025 survey commissioned by global services firm Ocorian, which focuses on family offices and private wealth managers, most of the 200 family offices contacted expect to increase their allotments to infrastructure assets by 25 to 50 percent by 2027.
One prominent example is Pontegadea Inversiones, the investment vehicle of Amancio Ortega, Europe’s second-wealthiest person and the founder of Inditex, parent company of fashion retailer Zara. Funded largely by the billions of euros in annual dividends Ortega receives from his Inditex stake, Pontegadea has built one of the world’s largest private portfolios of real assets, spanning prime commercial property, logistics facilities, and infrastructure across Europe and the U.S.
The move into infrastructure became particularly visible last year when the firm signed a deal to purchase a 49 percent stake in PD Ports from Brookfield. The company operates 11 ports and other logistics facilities across Britain, handling everything from bulk cargo and containers to renewable-energy components and industrial materials. The deal valued PD Ports at just under £2 billion. At the time, it was equivalent to $2.7 billion. Brookfield retained a controlling interest.
For Brookfield, the investment fit with its strategy of assembling long-duration infrastructure assets tied to global trade. For Pontegadea, it marked a rare step beyond trophy real estate into operating infrastructure.
The partnership also underscores the scale of Pontegadea’s capital. Few family offices are large enough to participate alongside a global alternative-assets manager like Brookfield in a transaction of this size. But Ortega’s investment vehicle has the balance sheet and long-term horizon to act as a true institutional partner rather than a passive co-investor.
At the other end of the wealth management spectrum sit registered investment advisors serving mass-affluent investors with less than $2 million in investable assets.
According to Brookfield’s Teskey, they are sometimes intimidated by the size of firms like his.
“The other big misconception we hear — the one that sometimes dominates headlines — is that megatrends like digitalization, the need for energy, deglobalization may be slowing down,” he says.
So instead of investing in ports, pipelines, or data center platforms outright, many RIAs are looking for liquid ways to gain more real-assets exposure. That often means using publicly traded real-assets equities or exchange-traded funds rather than private infrastructure funds.
“Everything we do is in a liquid form,” says Richard Bernstein, CEO and CIO of Richard Bernstein Advisors. “Paying for a lack of liquidity without higher returns doesn’t make sense to us.”
He draws a sharp distinction between speculative digital assets and traditional real assets that can protect purchasing power. His firm includes gold and materials stocks in portfolios but avoids cryptocurrencies, which he says behave more like liquidity trades than inflation hedges.
That preference reflects the needs of advisers whose clients cannot easily lock up capital for a decade. ETFs have become one of the main tools for gaining diversified exposure to commodities, infrastructure, and natural resources companies. One widely used vehicle is the VanEck Real Assets ETF, or RAXX, an actively managed “fund of funds” that invests in other exchange-traded products covering commodities, natural resources equities, REITs, and infrastructure companies.
RAXX portfolio manager David Schassler describes his ETF as “a one-stop shop for investing in real assets.” He points to the minerals, metals, and energy needed to power AI infrastructure and says,
“The new digital economy doesn’t exist without the old-world economy building it.” Interest from advisers has been rising as investors look for ways to benefit from AI-driven growth beyond the dominant technology stocks, he adds.
Still, enthusiasm for real assets is far from universal. At T. Rowe Price Advisory Service, portfolio manager Som Priestley points out that model portfolios for mass-affluent clients remain broadly diversified across fixed-income, equities, and alternative exposures. His team has actually trimmed some real-assets allocations recently, wary of volatility in commodities markets and speculative surges in metals prices.
“Once the market is so volatile, we don’t think it’s prudent to have to own those assets,” he explains.
Even so, the broader trend is clear. Advisers increasingly see real assets as a complement to traditional portfolios built around stocks and bonds. Whether through gold, energy companies, infrastructure equities, or diversified ETFs, the goal is the same one pursued by sovereign funds and family offices: maintaining purchasing power in a world where the returns from purely financial assets are less certain.
None of this means the shift to real assets is risk-free. Real assets themselves are hardly immune to cycles. The prepandemic boom in commercial and residential property was followed by a sharp correction as interest rates rose, wiping hundreds of billions of dollars off real estate valuations globally. Infrastructure assets tied to energy, shipping, or commodities can also experience long downturns when economic activity slows.
Another concern centers on the explosive growth of artificial intelligence infrastructure. Asset managers from Brookfield to DigitalBridge are racing to finance new data centers, power systems, and chip supply chains. Some analysts worry that the industry could repeat earlier technology cycles when infrastructure investment overshot demand.Last, the vehicles used to access many real assets remain controversial. Private infrastructure and real estate funds typically charge higher fees than traditional investments and lock up capital for years. That lack of liquidity and transparency can be difficult for financial advisers to explain to clients accustomed to the daily pricing of public markets.
Even many proponents of real assets acknowledge these risks. But the question, they say, isn’t whether the dollar system will disappear or whether real assets will outperform every year. It is whether, in a world of persistent inflation risk and volatile interest rates, investors want portfolios composed almost entirely of financial claims on currencies.
“Especially for an aging demographic, the long-dated nature of real assets complements the wealth requirements and retirement portfolios of individual investors who are looking for long-term inflation-linked, cash-generative assets,” notes Teskey.
