Private equity firms operating in Asia are increasingly deploying artificial intelligence (AI) to boost portfolio company earnings and secure exits, executives said on Tuesday, as the region’s deal-exit environment splits sharply between favored and lagging sectors.
Speaking at DealStreetAsia’s Asia PE-VC Summit in Singapore, senior dealmakers from Bain Capital, Brookfield, and Blackstone described what they called a “K-shaped” market, in which assets tied to data centres, semiconductors, and other strategic sectors are fetching strong buyer interest while consumer-facing businesses face longer holding periods and more complex restructuring.
Bain Capital partner Drew Chen said the firm remains bullish on AI infrastructure, pointing to a series of recurring supply bottlenecks in the sector.
“Every year the world discovers there is a new bottleneck,” Chen said, citing graphics processors, memory chips and optical components before data centres emerged as the latest constraint.
He pointed to Bain’s roughly $5 billion sale of a China data-centre platform last year as an example of strong demand for AI-linked assets, calling it likely the largest private equity exit in China in five years.
Brookfield’s Asia Pacific private equity head, Aditya Joshi, said the firm has restructured its investment process so exit strategies are mapped out at the point of acquisition, with deal teams required to identify buyer profiles and value-creation steps over a five-year horizon.
That approach helped Brookfield complete two Australian exits in the first half of the year, including the roughly $650 million sale of construction firm Multiplex, Joshi said.
Blackstone managing director Aravind Krishnan said the firm’s focus on control deals has helped it navigate Asia’s reputation as a difficult region for repatriating capital, giving it flexibility to exit through IPOs, strategic sales or block trades.
Blackstone has returned about $6 billion in equity from Asia over the past two years, he said.
AI moves beyond a thematic bet
Executives said AI is increasingly being used as an operational tool rather than purely an investment theme, as rising interest rates make earnings growth, rather than financial engineering, the primary driver of returns.
Joshi said Brookfield is applying an “AI toolkit” across industrial and services companies, including current deals in India, to improve production planning and supply chain management, drawing on the firm’s investment in OpenAI.
He said the approach helped lift return on equity at Australian financial services firm Latrobe to more than 60% from about 40% at entry.
Krishnan said more than two-thirds of Blackstone’s historic private equity returns have come from earnings growth rather than leverage.
The firm has built a team of roughly 100 operations professionals and 50 data scientists and AI engineers that works across about 275 portfolio companies, he said, citing Sona Comstar’s transformation into India’s largest electric-vehicle components maker as a flagship example.
Blackstone has also helped launch an AI services venture with Anthropic, called “O,” to help portfolio and third-party companies redesign workflows.
Panelists from the secondaries and private credit markets said they are positioning to address liquidity constraints in the region.
Jason Yao, deputy co-head of Asia at Ardian, said Asian secondaries account for just 2-3% of global secondary deal volume, well below the region’s 15-20% share of global private equity assets.
He said Asian insurers and other institutions have become “very sophisticated” in using secondary sales as a portfolio management tool, even as GP-led continuation vehicles in the region lag global volumes.
Raymond Chan, head of APAC credit at CPP Investments, said Asia’s bank-dominated market faces structural vulnerabilities, including maturity mismatches from financing long-term projects such as AI infrastructure with short-term bank funding.
He said real estate credit has already been “stress tested” through China’s property downturn and rapid rate hikes, while risks in corporate lending are only now becoming visible as banks tighten underwriting standards.
Joshi said private wealth is becoming a larger capital source for Brookfield, which manages about $1.3 trillion globally and is raising more than $100 million a month into semi-liquid funds aimed at high-net-worth and mass affluent investors.
Krishnan said limited partners are placing greater emphasis on the speed of capital return, tracking how quickly funds reach key distribution milestones, a trend he said is pushing general partners to move faster when exit conditions are favorable.