Rowan describes simultaneous global build-out across infrastructure, energy, manufacturing, defense, and AI.
“As a world, we are building infrastructure. We're building energy. We're doing energy transmission. We're building next gen manufacturing. We're ramping defense, and we're doing this thing called AI and data.”
Rowan mocks recent market reaction to AI's software impact as obvious rather than surprising.
“lo and behold, we think that AI might impact software. Is that news? Did we just discover that two weeks ago?”
Rowan says simultaneous global buildout of infrastructure, energy, manufacturing, defense, and AI will create largest capital need ever.
“As a world, we are building infrastructure, we're building energy, we're doing energy transmission, we're building next gen manufacturing, we're ramping defense, and we're doing this thing called AI and data.”
Rowan criticizes managers who only recently realized AI threatens enterprise software, calling it foreseeable.
“If you discovered eight weeks ago that enterprise software was vulnerable to AI, you kind of weren't doing your job. This is this is knowable, and we're we're seeing, this technology shift”
Rowan says the real story is private equity's 30% concentration in enterprise software during an AI-driven technology shift.
“we're seeing, this technology shift take place at a point in time when the private equity industry spent a decade where 30% of their activity was enterprise software. That to me is the story.”
Rowan argues enterprise software losses are about sector concentration and AI disruption, not public versus private structure.
“Because if you're public and you are concentrated in enterprise software, the stocks are down 6070%.”
Rowan says Apollo avoided single-asset AI bets, instead spreading across positions with structures creating convex upside and downside protection.
“We have spread across with the right structures and the right protections with the right risk reward to kind of create convex convex upsides while getting some amount of downside protection and some notion of our money back.”