Full Transcript: Brookfield Asset Mgmt Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Brookfield Asset Mgmt (NYSE: BAM ) released second-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Wednesday. Read the complete transcript below. APIs provide real-time access to earnings call transcripts and financial data. Visit to learn more.

View the webcast at Summary Brookfield Asset Mgmt reported record second-quarter fundraising of $77 billion, driving fee-related earnings up 20% year-over-year to $808 million and distributable earnings up 15% to $707 million. Strategic initiatives include expanding AI infrastructure capabilities, highlighted by partnerships with Nvidia and Bloom Energy, and launching the AI Infrastructure Fund targeting $10 billion. The company expects 2026 to be a record year with strong fundraising momentum across flagship and complementary strategies, and anticipates continued growth in 2027 with the launch of real estate and credit flagship funds.

Operational highlights include the completion of the Oaktree acquisition, further strengthening Brookfield's credit platform, and the expansion of partnerships for AI infrastructure development globally. Management expressed confidence in navigating current market uncertainties with limited exposure to pressured areas and significant positioning in high-demand sectors like real assets, credit, and AI. Full Transcript OPERATOR (Operator) Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Brookfield Asset Mgmt second quarter 2026 conference call and webcast.

At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised.

To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Jason Fooks, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Jason Fooks, Managing Director, Investor Relations Thank you for joining us today for Brookfield Asset Mgmt's second quarter 2026 earnings call. On the call today we have Connor Teskey, our Chief Executive Officer, Hadley Pierre Marshall, our Chief Financial Officer, and joining us this quarter, Sikander Rashid, our Global Head of AI Infrastructure and Head of Europe. S. and Canadian securities law.

These statements reflect predictions of future events and trends and do not relate to historic events. They're subject to known and unknown risks, and future events and results may differ materially from such statements. S. and Canada and the information available on our website.

Connor will begin with an overview of the quarter, including our record fundraising and strategic partnerships that continue to strengthen our platform. Sikander will discuss our AI infrastructure strategy in greater detail, including the differentiated position we built, our growing momentum, and the opportunity ahead. And Hadley will review our financial and operating results and our balance sheet. After our formal remarks, we'll open the line for questions.

To ensure we hear from as many participants as possible, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question. If you have a follow-up, please rejoin the queue and we'll take additional questions as time permits. With that, I'll turn the call over to Connor. Connor Teskey, CEO Thank you, Jason, and good morning everyone.

Similar to last quarter, we expect 2026 will be a record year for Brookfield, and not by a small margin. Reinforcing this, the second quarter was exceptional by almost any measure—record fundraising, with both earnings and fee-bearing capital growing well ahead of our long-term targets. It sets us up well for what we expect to be a record year across the board. Fee-related earnings for the quarter were $808 million, up 20% from the prior year.

Distributable earnings were $707 million, up 15%, and fee-bearing capital reached $672 billion, up 19% over the last 12 months. Perhaps most importantly, the quarter delivered $77 billion of fundraising, our strongest fundraising quarter ever, and was led by two of our flagship strategies and the $40 billion Just Group mandate. This mandate increases the insurance capital we manage by more than a third and further extends our reach into retirement. It also reinforces our differentiated insurance model.

Brookfield Wealth Solutions holds the assets and liabilities on its balance sheet while we manage the capital for a recurring fee. For BAM, that means recurring fee revenue at scale on an asset-light basis without assuming any insurance liabilities. However, even if we set the Just Group mandate aside, the second quarter would still have set a record for organic fundraising, driven by momentum across our two flagships, both of which are on track to be the largest vintages of their kind. Alongside a broad set of complementary strategies, this brings year-to-date fundraising to $98 billion and fundraising over the last 12 months to $163 billion.

These results reflect the strength and diversity of our franchise, the depth of our client relationships, and the growing importance of the assets and businesses we own. Both our earnings and our fee-bearing capital are compounding above the long-term targets we set out, and they are doing so across essentially every part of the platform. That breadth is especially valuable in the current environment. Last quarter we discussed that we have limited exposure to the areas under the greatest pressure, like software and sponsor-led direct lending.

But at the same time we have outsized exposure to the areas where there is high demand. The developments of the past quarter have reinforced both sides of that equation. Our non-traded BDC sits within a broadly diversified suite of products representing less than 1% of our fee-bearing capital. However, the team has been prudent in raising and deploying capital over the past several years, delivering strong performance and allowing the fund to enter this period under-levered and with ample capital resources.

This quarter, redemption requests fell below 5%, which the fund met in full. At the same time, we continue to see robust inflows into our other wealth strategies, particularly infrastructure. But more important than the strong downside protection is how we are positioned for the greatest growth opportunities in the market today. Three areas stand out.

The first is real assets. In today's environment, marked by pockets of uncertainty and volatility, investors gravitate towards high-quality, cash-generative assets and essential services businesses. Real assets tend to outperform in periods like this because they offer precisely what investors are seeking—capital preservation, inflation protection, and both cash generation and value appreciation. This is exactly where we have leading strategies, and that strength is showing up across fundraising, deployment, and monetizations.

The second area is credit. Last week we completed the acquisition of Oaktree, fully combining the two businesses together. Our credit platform has leading scale and depth of capability across asset-backed finance, real asset finance, and opportunistic credit, and is well positioned to perform across market cycles. Full integration lets us source and underwrite more effectively and deliver the full breadth of our combined capabilities on behalf of all our investors.

And the third area is AI. Our leadership across the entire AI infrastructure value chain—data centers, power generation, and compute—gives us a rare and differentiated set of capabilities, notably the ability to raise capital at scale, to source proprietary opportunities, and to build relationships with the hyperscalers, sovereign governments, and other key players across the AI ecosystem. Our ability to bring these skills together to meet one of the largest investment opportunities globally is why this has become one of the fastest-growing parts of our business.

And we're pleased that Sikander is joining us today to walk you through the momentum in our AI Infrastructure Fund. That leadership is now translating into partnerships that are scaling rapidly. We have expanded our framework with Bloom Energy to finance quick-to-deploy power solutions for AI infrastructure fivefold, from $5 billion to $25 billion in just nine months—a measure of the sheer scale of what lies ahead. Through our sovereign AI infrastructure initiatives, we've increased our development framework with France from 20 billion euros to 30 billion euros.

And we've partnered with Naver and Nvidia to accelerate the expansion of South Korea's sovereign AI infrastructure. Nvidia, who joined our AI Infrastructure Fund as an investor and a founding partner, is also both a cornerstone investor and our technology partner, and in the compute platform at the center of that build-out. S. Government's effort to accelerate nuclear deployment.

5 billion financing commitment to support the development of up to 10 Westinghouse AP1000 reactors. And Sikander will discuss our recently announced deal to build a large AI factory in Kentucky. We are also forming new relationships that broaden the opportunity set. We partnered with OpenAI to launch a company focused on accelerating commercial AI adoption, including within our own portfolio of industrial and manufacturing businesses.

And the same partner-of-choice dynamic extends beyond AI. We partnered with AllianceBernstein to bring private market real assets into their target date funds—an example of our growing involvement in the 401(k) market, a segment that we feel is well suited to our real asset focus and one of the largest long-term growth opportunities we see anywhere. Taken together, these partnerships demonstrate the strategic value of our platform. Few firms can bring together capital, operating capabilities, energy, digital infrastructure, and strategic relationships at this scale.

So to conclude, we are entering the second half of the year with record results, exceptional strategic momentum, limited exposure to the areas causing the most concern, and meaningful exposure to where capital should continue to flow. We are positioned not simply to navigate this environment, but to outperform through it. With that, we will hand the call over to Sikander to give you more color on the strong momentum in our AI infrastructure strategy. OPERATOR (Operator) Thank you.

As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile our Q&A roster. Our first question will come from Bart Dazarski from RBC Capital Markets.

Your line is now open. Bart Dazarski, Analyst at RBC Capital Markets Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe picking up on that last sentence there, Hadley.

You know, clearly a very strong fundraising quarter; you're running at about $60 billion year to date if we adjust for just group, and so we'd love for you to just unpack the fundraising outlook for the back half of the year, including some of the key drivers that underpin that outlook. Thanks. Hadley Good morning. Thanks for the question.

Yeah. So year to date, we're obviously on a record-setting fundraising pace at almost $100 billion in the first six months. We still expect to do a lot more this year and, as a result, we expect to far exceed the business's previous high-water mark, both on an absolute basis and if you excluded large insurance transactions. Perhaps the most important thing about that guidance is we expect to raise very significant amounts of capital throughout the remainder of the year, but it's very nicely balanced across four channels.

We expect it almost to be roughly equal across flagships, complementary equity strategies, debt strategies, and insurance inflows. And that diversity gives us a lot of comfort that even if there are some changes—unforeseen changes—in the market over the next six months, we're certainly going to land well into record territory, almost no matter what. Bart Dazarski, Analyst at RBC Capital Markets Very helpful. Thanks for the color.

OPERATOR (Operator) Thank you. Our next question comes from Sherrilyn Radbourne from TD Cowen. Your line is now open. Sherrilyn Radbourne, Analyst at TD Cowen Thanks very much and good morning.

Given that you just closed the acquisition of the remaining stake in Oaktree, maybe you could give us an update on your view of the credit landscape in two respects: one, whether there's enough depth to finance the scale of what has been proposed industry-wide in AI; and then an update on your view of the opportunity set for Oaktree in sort of the 2027, 2028 timeframe. Hadley Thanks, Sherrilyn. Maybe just an overarching comment to frame this: we see credit markets as incredibly robust right now.

Yes, there's these small kind of pockets of uncertainty in very specific corners of credit markets, but by and large, the appetite for credit from banks, from insurance companies, from institutions—in particular for high-quality real assets—remains incredibly strong. And across all of our verticals, we're setting record financing levels at very attractive rates. So is there enough capacity and funding to support the buildout we're seeing in infrastructure and AI? Infrastructure, absolutely.

And, candidly, we expect to play a fairly significant role in that. In terms of the opportunities for Oaktree, yes, we closed the transaction on Monday, but, candidly, the integration has been happening since last October. And where we really see the upside for that business is on the revenue front—the ability to include Oaktree into Brookfield Asset Mgmt's broader distribution, product development, multi-asset programs with our largest partners. We're already seeing the benefits of that flow through their business.

Perhaps just the last comment I would make—and it goes a little bit to the previous comment on fundraising—we're also seeing an incredibly nice staggering of major fundraisers going forward. This year, obviously, is our infrastructure and private equity flagships. We very much expect our credit flagship, Oaktree Ops, to be in the market in 2027. We expect our real estate flagship to be in the market in 2027.

And then we expect energy to be back in the market in 2028. We're seeing all those flagship timelines being pulled forward just based on our deployment and demand. OPERATOR (Operator) Thank you. P.

Morgan. Your line is open. P. Morgan Hi, good morning, and thank you for taking the question.

I wanted to follow up on your prepared remarks on AI infrastructure investment. Lots of firms and lots of funds are raising money for AI infrastructure. Demand seems big, but fundraising has been big here too. Is infrastructure and AI infrastructure investing getting crowded?

And what is competition like for the largest deals? And then along the same lines, you have a number of AI infrastructure partnerships across different regions. How important are these and future partnerships to be able to scale your infrastructure buildout given the substantial dedicated and commingled capital you are raising? Hadley Thank you.

Sikander Rashid (Global Head of AI Infrastructure and Head of Europe) I can. It's Sikander. Thank you for the question. I can take this one.

Look, so on competition. Yes, we agree there is competition. Since we launched our dedicated AI infrastructure strategy last year, we've noticed the launch of several AI funds. But look, despite the competition, the demand for our AI infrastructure fund remains very strong, both from institutional investors, but also industrial partners, a host of whom we are in advanced discussions with at the moment.

And the investor interest in our fund boils down to really our differentiators, which are as follows. Number one is energy. So in the AI value chain today, energy is the largest bottleneck. For context, the US alone needs 100 gigawatts of power for AI infrastructure in the next 10 years.

But the grid can only make 30 gigawatts of that available. And what that means is in the future, compute needs to migrate towards the power sources. And when you look at our energy business today in the US or around the world, we are the largest energy business and we've been developing large-scale power plants for decades. Secondly, we have strong digital infrastructure capabilities.

As I mentioned in my remarks, we have an $85 billion business which includes six distinguished data center platforms in five different continents. And lastly, look, our focus is not on data centers, only data centers. This is not a data center fund. Our fund is focused on the full AI value chain and that includes data centers, AI factories, power and compute.

Power and compute will account for 60% of the capital in the next 10 years. And I think that's going to be a differentiator for us going forward. And on your question on strategic partnerships. Okay, look, on question on, I'll just finish my remarks on strategic partnerships.

Look, they are an important differentiator as well, our industrial partners. Whether it's Nvidia or Bloom, today the bottleneck is chips and power.