Dive Brief:
- Nuveen, the investment manager for retirement services company TIAA, said Wednesday it completed a $1.3 billion funding round for its second energy and power infrastructure credit fund to support a growing global power demand due to artificial intelligence, digitalization and electrification.
- The firm’s EPIC II fund will provide companies with credit solutions aimed at “supporting the build-out of secure and reliable energy and power generation while also focusing on credit opportunities involving sustainable infrastructure,” Wednesday’s release said.
- The fund has a $2.5 billion target and will take an all-of-the-above strategy to its energy investments, investing in renewables and energy storage technologies, along with liquefied natural gas and other fossil fuels.
Dive Insight:
Nuveen manages more than $1.3 trillion in assets, including more than $35 billion in infrastructure assets as of March 31, according to the release. The EPIC II fund — which shares the same investment strategy and name as its predecessor EPIC I — will provide project and corporate financing to companies for equipment and growth capital, along with financing acquisitions, capital restructuring and other structured credit options.
The senior managing director and portfolio manager of Nuveen’s energy infrastructure credit platform, Don Dimitrievich, said the fund is “focused on deploying capital into resilient companies and projects across the energy and power ecosystem” to capitalize on a “historic market opportunity.”
“Investors are increasingly interested in strategies that capitalize on their conviction in the growing global energy demand brought on by digitalization, electrification and reindustrialization while also seeking downside risk mitigation to guard against macro volatility, and inflationary and geopolitical risk,” Dimitrievich said in the release.
The initial funding round announced Wednesday was “anchored” by TIAA and an unnamed “leading Canadian pension fund manager,” Nuveen said. Investors other than TIAA were not disclosed, but the release said “nearly half” of the round’s funding commitments came from outside the U.S. The funding round included investments from global insurers, Japanese and Korean corporate and public pension funds, asset managers and limited partner investors, according to the release.
Nuveen was recently one of 25 financial institutions whose executives received a letter from Republican state finance officials, pressing them to “abstain” from incorporating net-zero asset commitments and abandon framing climate change as a long-term risk.
