Earnings Labs

DigitalBridge Group, Inc. (DBRG)

Q1 2024 Earnings Call· Tue, Apr 30, 2024

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day and welcome to DigitalBridge Group, Inc.'s First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Severin White. You may begin, sir.

Severin White

Analyst

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to DigitalBridge’s first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Speaking on the call today from the company is Marc Ganzi, our CEO, and Tom Mayrhofer, our CFO. I'll quickly cover the safe harbor. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business operations and financial performance may be considered forward-looking. And such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. All information discussed on this call is as of today, April 30th, 2024, and Digital Bridge does not intend and undertakes no duty to update it for future events or circumstances. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our most recent Form 10-K filed with the SEC for the year-ending December 31, 2023, and our Form 10-Q to be filed with the SEC for the quarter ending March 31, 2024. Great. So, it's the new year and in connection with the completion of our business transformation, we've advanced and further simplified the format of our earnings presentation. Going forward, we'll start with Marc providing a business update, highlighting key takeaways from the quarter, and covering thematics that would have historically been incorporated in our third section, executing the digital playbook. Tom will cover the financial highlights in the second section, followed by Q&A. Another advance that you'll notice is we've condensed our earnings presentation and supplemental financial report into 1 document. The goal here is to make it easier for investors to access a single doc that captures the highlights as well as some of the important detail behind the numbers. We look forward to your feedback on this new format. I also want to highlight our second Investor Day coming in a couple of weeks on Monday, May 13th at the New York Stock Exchange. Some of you will be joining us in person, others on the webcast. Either way, we're looking forward to outlining our simplified business profile, discussing the state of private markets, digital infrastructure and AI, and how we continue scaling our highly differentiated platform. In addition to our senior management, we'll be joined by some of our operating partners as we give you color on what's happening on the ground in digital infrastructure. With that, let's get started and I'll turn the call over to Marc Ganzi, our CEO. Marc?

Marc Ganzi

Analyst

Thanks, Severin. Let's start this call with our progress on FEEUM, which as you all know is our key revenue and earnings driver and the solid growth that we continue to see here. As you can see on the left, FEEUM grew 17% year-over-year to $32.5 billion at the end of the first quarter in 2024. Importantly, FEEUM growth was driven not only by our flagship strategy DigitalBridge Partners III and the corresponding co-invest but also via our expanding multi-strat offerings which include contributions from credit and liquid this quarter. In fact, if we hadn't had a step-down in separately capitalized portcos, as Vantage deadco moved from our latest flagship fund, FEEUM actually would have been up over 20% year-over-year. That transaction which we announced in January is similar to the Vertical Bridge deal we did in DigitalBridge Partners II, which created some short-term FEEUM pressure, but over the long term allows us to maintain exposure to the best growth platforms. In this case, Vantage is one of the best global hyperscale data center platforms, building large campuses at scale with what we think is the best management team in the world, led by our CEO, Sureel Choksi. In partnership with Silver Lake, we're planning on building over 3 gigawatts of capacity to meet the growing demand for cloud and AI infrastructure. And at the same time, DigiBridge shareholders will now earn carry as we create incremental value at that platform versus just a straight historic management fee, which is what investors were getting in the original investment vehicle that we built at Vantage. Bottom line, FEEUM growth year-over-year remain solid. And next quarter, you'll continue to see this metric March higher as we close incremental capital across all of our strategies. Next slide please. Next up is new capital…

Thomas Mayrhofer

Analyst

Thank you, Marc, and good afternoon, everyone. As a reminder, this earnings presentation is available within the shareholders section of our website, and this quarter, we've combined the previously separate [Technical Difficulty] financial report with the earnings presentation for your convenience. Starting on Page 15, our key operating and financial metrics have seen significant year-over-year growth. Fee revenues, fee-related earnings and distributable earnings have continued to demonstrate positive trends year-over-year, and we expect this growth trajectory to continue as we progress through 2024. In the first quarter, we also generated year-over-year growth in new capital formation as Marc discussed. As the year progresses, we expect momentum to build and full year results to align with our guidance targets. Our fee earning equity under management is $32.5 billion as of March 31st, a 17% increase from the same period last year, driven by organic capital formation in the DBP series, co-investments and credit strategies. This increase was partially offset by an anticipated fee-based reduction as Vantage data centers transitioned from our prior separately capitalized vehicle structure into our latest flagship fund, DigitalBridge Partners III, or DBP III, which extends our exposure to Vantage through its next phase of growth. Moving to Page 16, the company continues to simplify its financial reporting to align with our alternative asset management peers, specifically in our presentation of fee-related earnings and distributable earnings. Beginning in the first quarter, the company introduced fee-related earnings on a company-wide basis, which now incorporates corporate expenses and is not equivalent to the metric reported prior to 2024 investment management fee-related earnings. FRE metrics discussed in this earnings presentation for prior periods have been updated to reflect company-wide fee-related earnings and are suitable for period-over-period comparison. Starting with fee revenues, the company reported $72.8 million in the first quarter, marking…

Marc Ganzi

Analyst

Thank you, Tom. And again, thank you to Jacky Wu and our entire finance team for making your transition so seamless. Well, look, we're going to wrap it up. I want to thank everyone for their time and attention today. I think we've continued to lay out the foundations for how we're building we believe one of the most powerful alternative asset managers tied to some of the most exciting secular themes on the planet today. We're looking forward to welcoming all of you to our Investor Day. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to the operator for Q&A. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Michael Elias of Cowen & Company.

Michael Elias

Analyst

Marc, I just want to double click on your comments related to power, which -- I appreciate the framework you laid out. One of the things that you talked about is that data centers in part need to move to where the power is. To that point, I'm seeing a lot of activity in the Midwest of the United States. Curious how you're thinking about or how your view of markets has evolved, particularly, are you looking at places where historically there haven't been data center opportunities? That's my first question. And then second question as part of that is, as I think of the locations where there is power, but there aren't data centers currently, one of the things that I think is missing is network. You've talked about convergence in the past. What I'm curious about is how you think about the interplay between a data center platform like Vantage and Switch, and Zayo, a fiber company, in terms of delivering a holistic solution to the hyperscaler as we look to bring data centers to new markets where there is power? I know that's a lot, but I hope that makes sense.

Marc Ganzi

Analyst

No, you always make sense. And I think you're skating to where the puck is going, not to where the puck is. I want to sort of break your question down into 2 pieces, Michael. One is just to talk about the direction of travel on power. And then the second, I do want to talk about connectivity because you've nailed it, right? Connectivity is really critical. The capillaries that connect, obviously, interconnection to data centers, and then how this correlates to AI and where are those big language-based models being built and ultimately when we move from you know from training into inference, those locations become more latency sensitive, so we can explore that for a second. And I’ll be mindful that there's other people in the queue that have questions. This is a topic you and I could talk a lot about. Remember, data centers have sort of, there's kind of 2 screens to this. The first is, do our customers trust us to build their data centers and to continue to lease capacity from us? And what kind of workloads are they leasing from us? Coming out of this quarter, we had contributions from all 6 of our major data center platforms globally. So we spent a lot of time this last week aggregating that data and understanding what our customers are doing. And so what's really interesting to me is that there's such segmentation now between cloud and AI in those workloads and ultimately workloads that are latency sensitive and workloads that actually are very location sensitive from an AZ perspective. And so private cloud, public cloud, edge workloads, enterprise workloads, all of those workloads, Michael, are evolving in real time. And data centers are evolving too. And so I think that some of these locations…

Michael Elias

Analyst

Awesome, really appreciate that color. We can talk about this forever, but I'll pass it on to the next person.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Jade Rahmani of KBW.

Jade Rahmani

Analyst

I appreciate the comment around the carried interest reversal. Do you have any estimate of what distributable earnings would have been excluding that item?

Thomas Mayrhofer

Analyst

The carrier reversal is a mark to market, so that doesn't impact distributed earnings.

Jade Rahmani

Analyst

How do you feel about the outlook to achieve full year FEEUM in your prior outlook of $36 billion to $38 billion from the $33 billion at year-end ‘23?

Marc Ganzi

Analyst

Yes, I think Tom and I remain completely convicted in the numbers. We have no changes to our guidance at all. We're seeing exactly, we feel like we are where we want to be through the first quarter. And again, want to reiterate, no change to our guidance that Tom and I reiterated in the previous quarterly call. Thanks, Jade.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Ric Prentiss of Raymond James.

Ric Prentiss

Analyst

Good afternoon, everybody. A couple of questions. I want to follow along with Jay's question there, too. So obviously the outlook confirmed on the capital formation, $36 billion to $38 billion for ending TUM. Help us understand the pacing. Obviously, it's still pretty tough out there. And what's kind of like the gross funding versus net funding and the pacing for those returns as well? First. I have a follow-up question.

Thomas Mayrhofer

Analyst

So let me take the first one on capital information. Hi, Ric, how are you? So look, it certainly -- one could extrapolate it's tough out there, but honestly, Q1 in our line of work is always tough, Ric. LPs are defining their allocation strategy for the year. Not a lot of allocations are historically made in the first quarter. This is not germane to DigitalBridge. You look across the alternative, the alt space, and you'll see that fundraising historically is pretty tepid in the first quarter but we outperformed last year we outperformed 2022 and our outlook actually remains optimistic. We are in middle of closing multiple clients across multiple strategies. I think that was something I was trying to infer in our call this quarter is that the multi-strat approach to what we're doing is working, Ric, which is that people understand our proposition, not just in our flagship fund, not only in co-investments, but they understand what we're doing in core, in credit, in liquid, in continuation vehicles. And so we're seeing more repeat activity with LPs than we've ever seen. I think as it relates to our flagship fund, we're certainly where we want to be. We remain unchanged in our guidance around the third flagship fund. And I think it's exciting that we got Credit II launched earlier than we thought. So that strategy is now in flight a little earlier than expected. And certainly some of the co-investment vehicles are having a very strong quarter as well as we form capital around great companies like Switch and like Vantage. And some of our other companies that we're out forming capital for right now as we continue to build into the AI strategy. So we're legging in. Our LPs are legging in. Certainly some of the commitments related to flagship as I inferred on the call are tied to some other investment vehicles. So we slowed them down a little bit and now we're getting them over the goal line. But again, I want to reiterate, no change to our guide. We feel really good about our ability to raise the capital. The clients are happy with what we're doing and we anticipate a strong year. Your second question, Ric, I don't think I fully appreciated it. Can you reframe it for me?

Ric Prentiss

Analyst

Well, just there's some return of capital involved too, right? I mean, you have the Vantage.

Thomas Mayrhofer

Analyst

Yes, yes, so absolutely. You are correct. So in the first quarter, we did return some capital. We had some exits, and we created some DPI, good outcomes for investors. And at the same time, we formed capital. So part of the magic is we do return capital from time to time. And I mean the great news about Vantage is we return capital but we then put capital to work with our friends at Silver Lake. And as I intimated, we have a big co-investment vehicle that's getting ready to close there, which is exciting. And we love the fact that we retain that management team, we retain that asset, and we're deploying new capital that bears economics. So on a net basis we actually think much like Vertical Bridge, our exposure in terms of fees will rise over time, but here's the best part. We're getting US public investors get carry now on Vantage. It now sits in our fund product And so investors now get to participate in the success of what's happening at Vantage with Sureel and the team. And that should be a really good day for public investors. I know Ric, you like Sureel. I know every analyst on the street likes Sureel and likes what Vantage does. So, now our public shareholders get to ride sidecar with us and get to enjoy the profits of that hard work. And Sureel is absolutely doing a great job for us.

Ric Prentiss

Analyst

And the final question for me is obviously reaffirming the capital formation targets. Tom, you've made some changes in the way you present the financials and report. You mentioned the company-wide fee. How should we think about where you're headed on helping the street understand financial guidance and what are you looking specifically to benchmark against the peer group because obviously this change, I think, sounds like you're trying to line it up so it's much more comparable to the peer group?

Thomas Mayrhofer

Analyst

Yes, I think, we've tried to make it quite simple to follow. I think our financials are fairly almost self-explanatory. They drive, as Marc talked about, the fee raising, that converts directly into fee revenue and the expense side of the equation is relatively simple and straightforward as well. So, we hope we'll be able to deliver really clear, clean, and kind of results that you can follow and model and predict.

Ric Prentiss

Analyst

And I think you called out the margin improvement. What was that slide? Let me see, I'm there. Is there a target of where you want to get the FRE margins? And is there important size of scale that you want to try and achieve also? That's one for me as well.

Thomas Mayrhofer

Analyst

Yes, I think, look, I think the scale is not kind of binary. I think it is kind of gradual. And as we continue to grow, we'll continue to achieve scale. I don't think there's a step function change. I think as we continue to grow, particularly when you have multiple products in a family. So, you get DBP III, DBP II, DBP I, that gives you a lot of scale. So I don't think we're going to set a target on FRE margins, but every new dollar of revenue that we bring in, we feel like improves the margin.

Marc Ganzi

Analyst

Yes, and I'll just come behind you on that, Tom. I think we are seeing, as that incremental capital dollar comes in on flagship III and incremental dollars come in on Credit II, we do see the opportunity for margin expansion. I think in the first quarter we had some new FTEs that came on. We did some hiring as we are expanding into some other strategies, which we'll certainly talk about Investor Day. But we've been really good at sort of being able to home grow our own best ideas around products. And as those products scale, we ultimately, they turn the corner and they create efficiencies and we get margin expansion, not margin compression. So I think as the year goes on, Ric, in the second, third, and fourth quarter, as we close capital, again, it's kind of like a wedding cake. That capital comes on with very little to no incremental G&A. And so I think what you'll see is not only the revenue contribution expands on a run rate basis throughout the year, that's where business works, but also you'll see a revenue contribution expansion as well because there's not a lot of incremental heads, Tom, associated with our second credit strategy nor our Fund III. And the co-investment vehicles that we're raising right now, and certainly some of the other products we'll be unveiling this year. So I think in large, we remain very convicted about the guide. And more importantly, we remain convicted about the ability for us to improve revenues and margin as the year goes on, Ric, much similar to what happened last year.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Richard Choe of JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Richard Choe

Analyst

I just wanted to follow up on Ric's questions a little bit. With the FEEUM guidance being reiterated, is the fee revenue guidance also being reiterated and how much of that is coming from catch-up fees? And then following on with that is the FRE guidance, I guess now that it's a consolidated number, not digital, I am related, is that $150 million to $165 million still a good number for the year?

Thomas Mayrhofer

Analyst

Hey, Richard, how are you? First of all, thank you. One, I think I would just go yes, yes, yes, if we just want to be quick about your questions. Let me give you a little more color behind it. I think on the fundraising piece, there will be inevitably be catch-up fees, right? That always happens. There'll be catch-up fees in Q2, Q3, and Q4. And the timing of that always is a little bit tricky. So some quarters may have a little more catch-up fees than others. I don't think we're exactly going to handicap how much catch-up fees we're going to have over the 3 quarters at this point in time but suffice to say your assumption is correct. And the assumption remains accurate as we bring on that $7 billion to $8 billion of incremental capital this year. You can anticipate that all 3 quarters coming will have catch-up fees and flagship and certainly to a lesser extent, credit. Obviously, continuation funds and co-investments, we get the fees immediately. So we do anticipate there being some velocity in that, it'll pick up as we go throughout the year. I think the other 2 answers to your questions were yes and yes. We're not changing the guidance. And obviously now that everything's all rolled up in a one consolidated number, hopefully it's easy for you guys to all digest, and if it isn't, we're always available to talk about it and give you any more granular information you need.

Marc Ganzi

Analyst

The guidance was created on a company-wide basis. So it's not a -- does not change.

Thomas Mayrhofer

Analyst

It's not an IM versus operating, it's all just one company now.

Richard Choe

Analyst

Great, just wanted to clarify that. And then going back to the strategy presentation earlier, do you expect to just benefit from kind of the data center growth, or can there be, I guess, incremental returns being generated from, I guess, the transmission and power solutions that you come up with? And how big could that be? And would that require, I think you've talked about in the past, kind of different maybe teams or funds or can this all be captured in the existing, I guess, with the existing infrastructure?

Marc Ganzi

Analyst

Yes, it's a great question. I'm going to break the answer down into 3 components. One, applied learnings over the last 36 months have been really happening at our portfolio companies. And so the good news about having a global footprint and having 6 powerful platforms is we do business literally with every power provider on the planet. So we have great insights into what's happening in Campinas and Tambore, what's happening in Kuala Lumpur, what's happening in Tokyo, what happens in places like certainly like Berlin or Cardiff or London and then of course here in the US and Canada. So it's been great to have these great management teams that have been out executing some of these renewable solutions like at Switch and Scala which are a hundred percent renewable already. It's really exciting what we've done at Scala that's all hydro, we lease transmission infrastructure, we have our own substation, we've created our own grid in Campinas. We sell power, obviously, to ourselves. We certainly could sell power to other data center operators. We don't. But that was a great learning experience for us, Richard, over the last 3 years. Really exciting what we've been able to do at Switch. Certainly, the Reno campus is a model for the future, given the amount of exposure to solar there and hydro. Our partnership with the Nevada Power and Light and a few other utility companies has taught us a few things. And the best way to really drive this stuff, Richard, is to drive it at the portfolio company level and drive those experiences with customers. And that's what we've been doing. And so having exposure to great management teams, great customers, creating great solutions has been what it does. And that stuff percolates back up to us…

Richard Choe

Analyst

Great. Look forward to the Investor Day where we can go over this stuff in more detail. Thank you.

Marc Ganzi

Analyst

Looking forward as well. Thanks, Richard. See you up in New York.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Eric Luebchow of Wells Fargo.

Eric Luebchow

Analyst

So, Marc, maybe I just wanted to get the latest pulse on the M&A market where you're finding maybe some relative value today. It seems like data centers and kind of developed market towers are still priced pretty aggressively. So are you finding any better value in Fiber, whether it's residential or enterprise?

Marc Ganzi

Analyst

So yes, I would say look, the value proposition on Fiber is, you are correct, is initially starting in residential. Resi fiber has got some really interesting Platforms that you know we think some sponsors perhaps paid too much, put too much leverage on them and so there's an opportunity to play either through our credit fund or play through our third flagship fund. I think we have got a significant amount of new pipeline of ideas. We're prosecuting over 20 new ideas in our third flagship fund. A couple of those ideas are in the fiber space where we are seeing significant value. I think the deals that were once priced in the 18 to 25 times EBITDA range are now pricing in the, call it, 10 to 14 times range and we're even seeing some interesting opportunities in other verticals of residential fiber where we think those could price down into the single digits. So I think there's value to be found, but you have to be careful, right? There's pitfalls with that. The entry price is just one part of the proposition when you're an investment committee. There's follow-on CapEx. You've got to continue to invest in these networks. And some of these businesses in the residential fiber space are under-invested because they're competing against well-capitalized cable companies or [ R Box ] . So we've looked at a lot of stuff, we've said no to a lot of stuff, we've green lit 1 deal already in the fiber space. We're looking at another one in our third flagship fund, but again, there's a lot to do out there. It's not just in the fiber space, not in the resi fiber space, But we also see opportunities certainly in the enterprise fiber space. And then most importantly, we really like the data center connectivity space. So that's really long haul, metro rings and data center connectivity or AI connectivity where we're integrating that with a data center solution and a power solution to a customer. There's a lot happening in connectivity right now. But one thing is for certain, as we said on the call today, fiber is critical. Fiber is critical to AI, fiber is critical to ultimately connecting the edge, and fiber is critical to bringing ultimately low latency, high speed solutions to IoT networks, small cells, everything we're doing and everything we're touching does involve that connectivity in the fiber. So we don't see the vertical going away. We do see value. But I actually think some of that value will be more pronounced next year. There's close to $80 billion of LBO debt that's rolling in the next 36 months. Some of that is in the fiber space. And so we're looking forward to taking a look at some of those opportunities and being a helpful partner to companies that need capital.

Eric Luebchow

Analyst

I appreciate that Marc. And just a follow up, I know it's touched on data centers a lot, but maybe you can just give us an update on what you're seeing in terms of where kind of market rents have gone in data centers. We talked a lot about the supply demand imbalance. Have they continued to move higher this year? And kind of where does that take unlevered returns today, just given where cost of construction and lean times are? And I guess, is there a breaking point at which we're going to see pricing growth start to slow down, or a point at which the hyperscalers might try to bring more in-house if the industry keeps raising pricing? Thanks.

Marc Ganzi

Analyst

That's a dangerous question, right? Certainly, I don't love to talk about pricing on our calls, but what I would tell you is broadly speaking, we continue to believe that there is a really good opportunity to continue to work with our partners and get paid for the risks that we take. And what I mean by that is that obviously there is a big opportunity and look, if our customers could self-perform, they would. And we never tell a customer that they can't self-perform. I'd be the last person in the world to tell any of the hyperscalers that they cannot build their own data centers and can't self-perform. I think the challenge today, if you're looking and taking a step back, is there is that constraint of power. And there is that constraint of resources, of land and building permits. And just it's a question of focus at the end of the day. What is the best use of Microsoft's time or Amazon's time or Meta's time or Google's time? We think they will self-perform some of their workloads, 30% to 40%. And we continue to believe 70% to 60% percent of the time they're going to work with folks like us that have the inventory, that have the land, that have the permits, and have the will-serve letters. So, as I said before, we're lighting up 2 gigawatts right now. So we're pretty busy. That's on top of the 1.8 gigawatts to 1.9 gigawatts we already have online today. So we think on an aggregate basis across all of our platforms, we're one of the largest, we think, the largest data center operator in the world in terms of certainly power online, square footage, number of data centers, and certainly the ability to service private cloud, public…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Jon Atkin of RBC Capital Markets.

Jonathan Atkin

Analyst

I was interested in maybe drilling down on towers, thinking about US and maybe LatAm and opportunities that you might see for consolidation to increase your presence in that sector. And then I've got a follow-up.

Marc Ganzi

Analyst

So your first question is just around tower M&A?

Jonathan Atkin

Analyst

Yes.

Marc Ganzi

Analyst

I think, look, we continue to be very acquisitive on the tower front Jonathan. The 4 theaters that we operate in Asia, Europe, North America and Latin America all certainly active from an M&A perspective and we've been looking at tower transactions in all 4 theaters inside this quarter interestingly enough. The one theater that, that I think did resonate the most in this quarter was the US. We continue to be really bullish about the US tower market. Maybe perhaps you can tell from the way the stocks traded today, maybe public investors weren't, but I wouldn't bet against the tower industry. So we did an acquisition at Vertical Bridge. We did a tuck-in, Shentel. We like that tower footprint. We like where the Shentel assets are. Really difficult to zone towers and carry our own portfolio that now we've turned and we're going to migrate onto our platform which creates a lot of good opportunity and a lot of good lease-up. We've continued to look at tuck-ins in Europe across our 3 different European platforms. We have FreshWave, we have Belgian Tower Partners, and we have GD Towers in our partnership with Deutsche Telekom. Again, there we've been very acquisitive. We've been looking at everything. But ultimately, in this quarter, the stuff that we saw trade in the quarter was too expensive for us. Ireland being a great comp, we just couldn't get to a mid-20s multiple for towers that were fairly mature in Ireland. And also, when a sophisticated seller like Cellnex sells, we obviously, our antenna is up. We really respect Marco. He's a good friend of mine, and Cellnex is a great company. So when they're selling assets, we tend to be pretty careful about where those assets are selling and at what price. At…

Jonathan Atkin

Analyst

Well, appreciate those comments And then maybe just turning to fiber and small cells. I know you talked about it earlier on the call, but any ways in which you could see maybe augmenting the ExteNet activities and then Zayo domestically, any kind of capital opportunities, whether it's M&A or just increasing your development capital, how do you view those opportunities?

Marc Ganzi

Analyst

Well, look, we have 3 small cell operators. FreshWave in the UK continues to deliver workloads for our customers indoors and outdoors. Boingo does a great job on the Wi-Fi side and indoor networks. ExteNet, largest private provider of outdoor small cell infrastructure. And look, we're busy, right? We're building, we're taking on bookings. We are seeing momentum as obviously the overlay in 5G starts to move to densification. And we think that densification for 5G really exists kind of in ‘25, ‘26, ‘27, and ‘28. That follows a similar migration path to ultimately the 3G and what we did in LTE and LTE plus. Our customers are telling us they still need small cell infrastructure. They still need an outsourced solution. And so again, we remain long term bullish about the fact that ultimately a lot of this infrastructure needs to support Generative AI, it needs to support those workloads. Macros get a lot of it done, but ultimately the proliferation to true Generative edge AI fits down at the handset. And so we really talk about data gravity a lot, Jonathan, and those workloads start in those learning models. They're moving into training, they're moving into inference, Then they move into really resonant in the public cloud. Then they move to edge. Then we move to mobile edge. And then we move to near edge, which is the handset. This is the direction of travel of data. This is how the cloud was built. Ultimately, AI will follow a similar architecture over the next, let's call it the next 3 to 10 years. So we're excited about it and investors have to be a little patient, but we do believe in the long term nature of small cell infrastructure, Wi-Fi 6, private 5G networks and the opportunity to offload those networks.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I will now hand back over to Marc Ganzi for closing remarks.

Marc Ganzi

Analyst

Well, look, thank you, everyone, for tuning in to our Q1 call. We've laid out 4 simple tenets for you to think about as an owner of DigitalBridge or a prospective owner of DigitalBridge. There are 4 things that we're focused on this year. One, we're forming capital behind our best ideas. I think we've laid that case out today what our best ideas are and that we remain convicted in our ability to form that capital and then to deploy that capital. Second, we're investing. We're investing in the best secular ideas today that exist on the planet. Generative AI, mobile infrastructure, and ultimately the ecosystem and the power that supports that are all the key tenets and the foundation of our economy today. So investing in these tailwinds and investing in these secular thematics are critical and necessary. # 3, we're focused on scaling our platform. Scaling means either acquiring existing platforms like we did with A&P Capital or building out new products like we did with Core, our late-stage venture growth fund, our liquid strategies, and other alternative asset management strategies that we've been very good and skilled in terms of building those capabilities in-house. And then ultimately, we've got to asset manage. We've got to continue to perform at the portfolio company level. We've laid out some anecdotal cases for that, how some of our portfolio companies are delivering for customers and are delivering the future of networks for those customers. We appreciate your support. We're looking forward to hosting all of you May 13th in New York at our Investor Day. We're going to talk about these strategies in greater detail and how we plan to change the digital economy through some of the strategies and certainly through some of the investments that we're making to forge a new digital path and new digital infrastructure of the future. It's an important moment for us. We hope you'll join us. Again, thank you for your support and interest in DigitalBridge. We look forward to seeing you soon. Have a great day.

Operator

Operator

Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's event. Thank you for attending. And you may now disconnect your lines.