You probably don’t think about infrastructure when you flip on the lights, join the morning commute, or stream, scroll, and swipe through your day. Infrastructure fades into the background, until a pothole turns a routine drive into a repair bill, a dead zone drops your meeting mid-sentence, or a blackout shuts down operations. But the changes coming to the backbone of the modern global economy will be hard to ignore.
In a world increasingly dependent on electrification, data, automation, and circular resource flows, infrastructure will no longer be defined solely by roads, bridges, power grids, or plants. It will span the digital, environmental, industrial, and social systems that underpin productivity and human well-being. The PwC-Oxford Economics Global Infrastructure Outlook, 2025-50, estimates in real terms a cumulative $151.1 trillion in investments will be needed to build and maintain the world’s infrastructure in the coming decades.
That includes a baseline forecast of $32.7 trillion for investment in the US, rising to $42 trillion for “desired” benchmark spending that would put the US on par with high-performing peers across all sectors. The baseline spend equates to 4.3% of the estimated 2050 GDP, up from 3.3% in 2024. At nearly 22% of the world’s spending, more than one in every five dollars may be invested in the US. This investment tidal wave signals the infrastructure lifecycle—and the stakeholders involved at every stage—will need to fundamentally evolve.
- CFOs and operating teams responsible for planning, building, delivering and running these assets will face unprecedented pressure to manage complex, interdependent portfolios of new and existing assets that support growth, resilience, and decarbonization simultaneously, all while maintaining cost discipline and long-term asset performance.
- Infrastructure investors, meanwhile, will need to recalibrate their playbooks as the shift in asset classes, risk profiles, and operational demands of modern infrastructure transform every stage of the investment process, from deal execution through active ownership and exit.
Both investors and owners share a common challenge: navigating this new volume and complexity of capital decisions while making sure every dollar delivers.
Below, we outline strategic areas for investors and owners to focus on in this once-in-a-generation investment cycle. We also take a deeper look at the report’s findings, including the key categories of US infrastructure that will likely need investment in the coming decades.
