Earnings Call Transcript - BIP Q1 2026

Operator, Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Brookfield Infrastructure Partners 2026 Results Conference Call and Webcast. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Mr. David Krant, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

David Krant, Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Sherry, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Brookfield Infrastructure Partners First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. As introduced, my name is David Krant, and I am the Chief Financial Officer of Brookfield Infrastructure. I'm joined today by our Chief Executive Officer, Sam Pollock; and our Chief Operating Officer, Ben Vaughan. Also joining us today is Dave Joynt, a managing partner on our investments team. I'll begin the call today with a discussion of our first quarter 2026 financial and operating results, followed by an update on our capital recycling initiatives. I'll then turn the call over to Sam, who will provide an update on our recent strategic initiatives before concluding with an outlook for the business. At this time, I'd like to remind you that in our remarks today, we may make forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to known and unknown risk factors and future results may differ materially. For further information on known risk factors, I would encourage you to review our latest annual report on Form 20-F, which is available on our website. So with that, Brookfield Infrastructure had a strong start to the year, delivering record results while continuing to advance a number of strategic initiatives across the business. We generated funds from operations, or FFO, of $709 million or $0.90 per unit in the first quarter. This is a 10% increase compared to the prior year. This performance was driven by strong base business results, highlighted by FFO from our data and Midstream segments increasing 46% and 12%, respectively, compared to the prior year. Results in our Utilities and Transport segments reflected resilient underlying performance with the current period impacted by higher levels of capital recycling activity achieved during 2025. I'll now go through our results by segment in more detail. Our Utilities segment generated FFO of $201 million, up 5% year-over-year. The increase was primarily driven by inflation indexation and the benefit of over $500 million of capital commissioned into rate base, along with the contribution from our recently acquired South Korean industrial gas business. Moving on to our Transport segment. FFO was $283 million, slightly below the same period last year. The decrease was primarily attributable to loss contributions from our successful asset sales. As a reminder, this included our Australian export and container terminal operations, the partial sale of a U.K. port operation and the majority interest in a portfolio of fully contracted containers at our global intermodal logistics business. This was partially offset by the acquisition of our North American railcar leasing platform that closed on the 1st of January. After adjusting for all these factors, FFO was ahead of the prior year, reflecting higher volumes and tariffs generally across our rail and road operations. Our Midstream segment generated FFO of $190 million, up 12% compared to the same period last year. The increase reflects attractive commodity pricing, strong asset utilization and robust customer activity levels across our portfolio. Lastly, FFO from our data segment was $149 million, representing a step change increase of 46% compared to the prior year. The increase was driven by the contribution from our U.S. bulk fiber network, which we acquired in the third quarter of last year as well as organic growth across our data storage businesses, which included the commissioning of over 200 megawatts of operating data centers into earnings over the last year. In addition to the strong financial and operating results we have delivered, we also made meaningful progress towards our 2026 capital recycling goal with proceeds secured of $1 billion to date. This includes closing the initial tranche of our partnership on a portfolio of stabilized and under construction data centers in North America and the closing of the sale of the largest of four concessions within our Brazilian electricity transmission business. We also completed a secondary sale of a 12% interest in our North American gas storage business. And finally, in April, we signed an agreement to sell our bulk liquid storage business, the largest independent storage provider in Scandinavia. These asset sales improved our strong corporate liquidity position, which was $2.5 billion at the end of the first quarter. Our balance sheet remains well capitalized and our proactive approach to managing debt maturities has allowed us to remain opportunistic in the capital markets. During the quarter, we refinanced approximately $1.5 billion of nonrecourse debt on a net to bid basis, with no incremental borrowing costs for the business. Before turning the call over to Sam, I would like to briefly note that we have recently begun exploring whether a single combined corporate structure would be the best path forward for the business. The goal is to determine if on a tax-free basis, we can create a single corporate security that would enhance liquidity, increase index inclusion and create value for investors. We are in the early stages of this evaluation, and we'll provide an update when appropriate. So that concludes my remarks for this morning. I'll now turn the call over to Sam.

Samuel J. B. Pollock, Chief Executive Officer

Okay. Thank you, David, and good morning, everyone. For my remarks today, I'm going to discuss our strategic initiatives before concluding with an outlook for the year ahead. We have had an active start to the year with business development activity resulting in new strategic capital partnerships and continued progress under established frameworks. These partnerships are bilaterally sourced with high-quality counterparties and give us exclusive access to investment opportunities that require long-duration capital at scale. Increasingly, these frameworks are becoming a more meaningful avenue for growth, reinforcing our position as a partner of choice and expanding our opportunity set to deploy large-scale capital at attractive risk-adjusted returns. During the quarter, we established a new framework with a leading global investment-grade OEM, and launched an exclusive leasing platform for industrial equipment. Through this platform, we will provide long-term leasing solutions that are expected to generate predictable cash flows without residual value, interest rate or refinancing risk. We will have the sole discretion to enter leases under the framework with BIP's share of the equity investment expected to be upwards of $375 million. Our $5 billion strategic partnership to install up to 1 gigawatt of behind-the-meter power generation advanced further this quarter as well. We secured an additional $430 million CapEx project, bringing the total capital committed under the framework to approximately $1.6 billion. BIP's total equity commitment associated with the framework to date is approximately $60 million. Given the success of the behind-the-meter solution and strong customer demand based on speed to market, we may have the ability to expand the platform in the coming months. We also remain on track to close Clarus. This is New Zealand's leading gas infrastructure utility in the second quarter for an equity purchase price of approximately $70 million at our share. Now moving to our outlook. We are progressing through 2026 from a position of strength, and remain very constructive on the backdrop for infrastructure. While recent geopolitical developments have contributed to greater market volatility, the essential nature of our businesses and the regulated or contractual profile of our cash flows continue to provide resilience and growth. More broadly, demand for additional power, connectivity and logistics capacity continues to expand. This is being driven by digitalization, accelerating power demand, the rapid build-out of AI infrastructure and the ongoing reconfiguration of global supply chains. These tailwinds are expanding our opportunity set and providing attractive avenues to deploy capital at compelling risk-adjusted returns. Coupled with strong operating performance and a visible pipeline of organic growth projects, these factors position us well to deliver 10% plus per unit FFO growth in 2026. As David mentioned, our capital recycling program and balance sheet continue to provide the flexibility to fully self-fund the growth ahead. With multiple sale processes underway across our business and continued access to capital markets during windows of opportunity, we are well positioned to fund our investment pipeline while maintaining financial discipline. Taken together, this supports our confidence in the outlook for 2026 and our ability to continue compounding value for our unitholders over the long term. That concludes our remarks, and I'm going to pass it back to Sherry to open the line for Q&A.

Operator, Operator

And our first question will come from the line of Devin Dodge with BMO Capital Markets.

Devin Dodge, Analyst (BMO Capital Markets)

Wanted to start on the recently launched equipment leasing business. I'm just trying to get a sense if this is part of the strategy for investing inside data centers, what kind of time frame you'd expect to deploy that $1.5 billion of capital and what do you view as the main risks associated with that investment?

Samuel J. B. Pollock, Chief Executive Officer

Devin, this is Sam. I'll tackle that one. So the opportunity, I think, will likely be broader than just data centers, but initially, a good portion of the investment will be equipment for data centers. We get a lot of comfort over the transaction itself because we're able to provide capital to high-quality counterparties with investment-grade profiles with fully self-amortizing cash flow streams. So it's very attractive from that perspective. We think we can scale this up as far as timing and deployment of capital. I think our hope is that on a gross basis, we'll deploy $1 billion to $2 billion of equity capital. So BIP's share would be 25% of that. And we expect — it's hard to predict flow, but I think we would hope to do that within a 24-month period.

Devin Dodge, Analyst (BMO Capital Markets)

Okay. I appreciate that. Second question, I was going to ask about that Intel JV. I didn't see any mention of it in your release, but I think Intel disclosures suggested the payments to the JV may have started in Q1. I guess, first, was that the case? And how quickly can return on investment ramp up in the coming quarters as both those fabs come online?

David Krant, Chief Financial Officer

Devin, it's David here. I'll take that one. In the past, we generally won't provide many updates specifically on the project. I think those generally come, as you said, from the Intel side. Largely, the project has gone well. It's coming online in line with our targets in terms of scheduling. They did make their first small wafer payments in the quarter. I would expect the final capital contributions to go in over the next six months. And as those go in, I would expect the earnings to start to ramp up. So I would expect to start seeing that come through our transmission and distribution segment of our data business in Q3 and then full run rate will be in 2027.

Operator, Operator

And that will come from the line of Maurice Choy with RBC Capital Markets.

Maurice Choy, Analyst (RBC Capital Markets)

I wanted to start with this concept of a single combined corporate structure. I have to assume that when the BIPC shares were first created back in 2020, something like this was contemplated. And if so, what were some of the obstacles back then and how those may or may not be as big of an obstacle or even at all this time round?

David Krant, Chief Financial Officer

Maurice, it's David again. As we talked about this morning, we are in the early stages of considering this with the Board direction. It's probably hard to say what the obstacles are today. That's the work we'd like to complete over the next little while. As you know, the two companies for the last six years have served us well, but we're always looking at ways to improve our access to capital. Following a few things, obviously, the completion of our sister company BBU's process, we can now have some insights into how one simplified corporate structure will trade in the market. An early indication to that has been positive, and that this is the right time to reassess. That's probably all we can say at the moment, and I'll leave it at that.

Maurice Choy, Analyst (RBC Capital Markets)

Fair enough. Maybe if I could just finish off more on your energy portfolio. Obviously, we've seen a series of support or changes in federal and provincial government in Alberta and broader Canada. And also, there's been the conflict in the Middle East. Just your thoughts on the outlook for your business in the province, notably into pipeline and NorthRiver?

Benjamin Vaughan, Chief Operating Officer

Yes. Ben here. I'll take that question. All those developments are very positive for our Midstream business in Canada. We're seeing really strong demand from all of our clients for more access to our facilities and our pipelines. We completed about $400 million worth of growth projects in the past several months that are now starting to ramp up in terms of the revenue profile and delivering results. Most importantly, we have a very tangible, meaningful pipeline of pretty bite-size, relatively straightforward-to-execute and very low build multiple and highly accretive growth projects right in front of us. So I would expect the backlog — our pipeline — to grow. The backlog in Midstream is really attractive right now, and we expect to bring a number of those projects to final investment decision in the coming quarters. To put in perspective, the magnitude of the projects that we're looking at the opco level would be roughly in the $8 billion range from a pipeline perspective. So it's a fairly meaningful size number of projects we have to look at.

Operator, Operator

One moment for our next question. And that will come from the line of Robert Catellier with CIBC Capital Markets.

Robert Catellier, Analyst (CIBC Capital Markets)

I'd like to follow up on the potential corporate conversion that the Board is exploring, understanding it's quite early days. I wondered if you had any timelines for us in terms of what's reasonable to expect in terms of when a decision might be made?

Samuel J. B. Pollock, Chief Executive Officer

Rob, as I said, unfortunately, there's probably not a ton we can share on the timeline as of yet. We're just kicking off the process now.

Robert Catellier, Analyst (CIBC Capital Markets)

Okay. No, that's reasonable. I just wanted to dig into the Csquare IPO, which I understand they filed a confidential registration statement. I'm just curious as to how you chose the IPO route versus private sale and maybe you're dual tracking it, but perhaps you could comment on that and how much you're expecting to sell by way of IPO.

Samuel J. B. Pollock, Chief Executive Officer

Robert, I'll tackle that one. In discussions with our advisers, the capital markets for IPOs are quite open at the moment. There's a lot of anticipation for upcoming large tech IPOs. Public investors are looking for businesses that generate high cash flow, have strong growth prospects and have great tailwinds related to the AI sector. Our business Csquare basically ticks all those boxes. We think it has the potential to be one of the leading IPOs of the year. We're really excited about bringing that forward. So stay tuned.

Operator, Operator

One moment for our next question, and that will come from the line of Cherilyn Radbourne with TD Cowen.

Cherilyn Radbourne, Analyst (TD Cowen)

I wanted to ask a couple of questions on the data segment. I appreciate the data centers and Intel are the major growth drivers at the moment. Just curious how you think about the balance of your data portfolio in towers, fiber and so forth, what value that provides in terms of diversity, and what you see in terms of inorganic opportunities there?

Samuel J. B. Pollock, Chief Executive Officer

Cherilyn, maybe I'll start. Then I think you've given us a good segue to talk about what's going on in the AI infrastructure sector in particular, and we have Lief Williams here who I think can expand on some of the things going on. But talking about some of our other businesses, we're seeing continued strong growth across the sector. As Scott Peak mentioned a number of months ago at our Investor Day, there's a domino effect. The huge growth in data centers and AI is having impacts across basic utilities, power, Midstream and our other data businesses, including towers and fiber. We're seeing customers looking to expand density across their networks. On the tower side, we have a number of build-to-suit opportunities that we continue to execute in all our businesses across Europe and Asia. On our fiber businesses, there's still a huge amount in the U.S., in particular, and other parts of the world that have not been fiberized and are still operating on copper. That remains a lot of white space for us to continue to build out those networks and allow people to run these new devices and programs more effectively. We see this as a continued five-to-ten year build-out. All our businesses are well positioned. I'll turn to Scott to expand on the AI infrastructure space.

Scott Peak, Head of Data & AI Infrastructure

Thanks, Sam. Good morning, Cherilyn. The large users of AI factories and data centers are highly, highly active in the market. There's effectively no data center inventory remaining for 2026, and even 2027 is quite scarce. What's interesting is that the demand profile has broadened from just data center capacity into also looking for compute, so leasing GPU as a service as well as behind-the-meter power opportunities. We see a large opportunity for groups like Brookfield, who have tremendous access to capital and an asset base to participate across all of those different asset classes.

Cherilyn Radbourne, Analyst (TD Cowen)

Great. And then maybe just a quick follow-up on the data center side. I imagine that site selection and acquisition is particularly competitive and secretive. To what extent does having a sister real estate business help in that regard?

Scott Peak, Head of Data & AI Infrastructure

I would say it certainly helps. The scale of Brookfield is helpful in that regard. There's a kind of dual-track search for powered land. There's front-of-the-meter options and behind-the-meter options. Front-of-the-meter options are challenging because the number of load applications to utilities massively overwhelms the grid. Utilities are increasingly requesting large levels of credit or financial deposits, which is a huge disincentive to many parties looking for those front-of-the-meter power solutions. Behind-the-meter also has its challenges in delivering baseload power at speed with low emissions and in a highly modular way. That's where we think our Bloom partnership will be effective. More broadly, we're starting to see some pushback in some locations about the scale of these AI factories and the risk of it pushing up rates for local ratepayers. Brookfield has been doing large-scale projects across many asset classes for years, and we think we're very well positioned to help identify credible powered land sites and help bring them to fruition.

Operator, Operator

One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Robert Hope with Scotiabank.

Robert Hope, Analyst (Scotiabank)

Hoping to dive a little bit deeper on the AI factory and digital hub strategy. How are you progressing on those discussions with counterparties? Should we be in a position in 2026 to see some notable or sizable project announcements?

Scott Peak, Head of Data & AI Infrastructure

Yes, Robert. You do see tremendous demand from the large technology companies. The demand profile has broadened a little bit as well. There used to be a handful of large hyperscalers; now we have a wave of foundation model companies and inference operators also looking to secure capacity. There's a tremendous amount of noise in the market in terms of number of sites and timing of power ramp. What we're increasingly seeing is users looking for credible partners who have placed long-lead equipment orders and have true dates for when the power is available. That will benefit institutional partners like Brookfield who have tangible sites that have a real ramp. We've seen strong leasing activity on the Brookfield portfolio over the last couple of quarters, and we expect strong demand through 2026 and certainly through 2027.

Robert Hope, Analyst (Scotiabank)

Appreciate that. And then maybe moving over to the 10% plus FFO growth rate for 2026. Can you comment how you're tracking on that? The organic growth at 8% seems strong, and the commodity price environment seems to be helping, though it does appear that asset sales are coming a little quicker than M&A activity on the other side. Can you talk about the headwinds and tailwinds you're seeing there?

David Krant, Chief Financial Officer

Rob, I think you summarized things well. The first quarter was an excellent start; we delivered on our 10% target. With that behind us, we feel good about how the year is progressing. It's always hard to predict the timing of new investments and asset sales, but we have had good initial success on the capital recycling front. From an all-in cost of capital perspective, it's very attractive. The yield we'll see on that $1 billion is somewhere in the mid-single digits, probably. From an accretion perspective, I don't expect that to be a meaningful drag on the business as we look ahead. All in all, we started the year off well, we feel confident about our 10% for the year, and we'll continue to provide updates as we progress through the year.

Operator, Operator

Our next question will come from the line of Frederic Bastien with Raymond James.

Frederic Bastien, Analyst (Raymond James)

Good morning. You've historically leaned into periods of uncertainty to pursue large acquisitions. How are you thinking about your ability to deploy capital into a sizable transaction this year?

Samuel J. B. Pollock, Chief Executive Officer

Fred, you're right that we've historically taken advantage of dislocations. At the moment, the market remains relatively calm and constructive, given all the volatility. There's still a fair number of buyers out there, so I wouldn't describe this as an opportunistic market environment. Nonetheless, we're always on the lookout for large value opportunities. Today, the opportunity set around our AI infrastructure strategy is extremely strong, and I'm optimistic about doing some exciting transactions there. We're also seeing an uptick in activity across Europe and some larger value opportunities. We continue to monitor the capital markets; often some of our best acquisitions are when the public market pulls back and we can execute a take-private. We can't give you a timeline for our next large deal, but we have tremendous partnerships so we can execute on those opportunities and are optimistic there will be exciting deals ahead.

Frederic Bastien, Analyst (Raymond James)

That's helpful. I just wanted to tack on a Midstream-related question as well, thinking about monetization. How are you thinking about NorthRiver and a potential monetization there?

Samuel J. B. Pollock, Chief Executive Officer

Regarding NorthRiver, the business has had tremendous commercial success in the past couple of years. We've extended our contract term to close to 12 years now, and we think it's very well positioned. Our internal debate is whether we continue to build out the business to take advantage of additional growth or whether we bring it to market to see what is probably a constructive environment for Midstream businesses. We're weighing those considerations; it's performing really well, and we don't have an answer at this point in time.

Operator, Operator

I'm showing no further questions in the queue at this time. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Sam Pollock for any closing remarks.

Samuel J. B. Pollock, Chief Executive Officer

Great. Thank you, everyone, and thank you, Sherry, for hosting this call. We appreciate you joining us today to hear about our results. We look forward to the warmer weather ahead and the hockey playoff season. I hope all you Canadiens fans are cheering for my team. We look forward to providing an update in the quarter ahead.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. This concludes today's program. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.