Until recently, American companies dominated this critical area of communications infrastructure — all 900,000 miles of them, snaking across ocean floors, serving as the internet’s circulatory system, transporting the world’s data, communications, financial transactions, and even military and diplomatic traffic. China has now entered the business, with a $500 million program to link communications between Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

In 2022, supply-chain disruptions brought on by the pandemic caused a lull in new data center stock in Asia Pacific’s tier 1 markets (greater Tokyo, Sydney, Singapore and Hong Kong), dropping to 263 megawatts from a record-breaking 399 megawatts in 2021, according to CBRE’s Asia Pacific Data Centre Trends H2 2022 report.

Flood risk assessment is an important and growing concern for real asset investors. But measuring the threat of flooding to assets and locations is stuck at an embryonic stage and faces challenges stemming from limited historical data as well as data incompatibility.

Everyone talked about how much riskier the investment climate was immediately following the global financial crisis. But was it really?

According to the Federal Communications Commission, 22.3 percent of Americans in rural areas and 27.7 percent of Americans in tribal lands lack coverage from fixed terrestrial broadband. In Canada, an astounding 65.2 percent of First Nations reserves do not have access to universal service of 50 megabits per second download or 10 Mbps upload speeds. This remains both a challenge and an opportunity for infrastructure investment.