By now, most infrastructure professionals know that infrastructure needs to evolve with the world. With all growing demands, including climate change, technology for design and delivery, increased usage, and changing ways of working and living, infrastructure needs to be economically, technologically, and environmentally resilient. Our precious assets must be designed, engineered, constructed, and maintained with these three aspects of resilience as a core and founding principle.

Furthermore, owners are now requiring modern infrastructure to be smart in design, construction, and maintenance. They’re also requesting that the design incorporate well-organized data, optimized processes, and responsibly deployed AI.

Though interest in upleveling infrastructure is high, achieving smarter, more resilient assets is a tall order. It requires completely rethinking how infrastructure is developed, built, and operated, adopting leading-edge new technologies, innovative new processes and modern methods of construction, globally exposed supply chains, and a new breed of digitally native infrastructure professional.

Fortunately, infrastructure owners and operators don’t have to achieve all of the above on their own. Three specific trends have emerged that enable the development of modern infrastructure and ensure new developments are smart and resilient.

 

Growth in Investment Capital

The first of these enablers is the foundational layer of judiciously invested capital. Infrastructure capital fuels major programs and projects and stimulates economic activity, delivering value creation at GDP, GVA, and social value levels. It also creates sector-level economic trends, including growth in investment for AI in master planning, autonomous plant in construction, and robotics and drone use in asset maintenance. Infrastructure has long been a credible asset class for investors, but with well-organized data, secure, scalable, and open systems and networks, and responsibly deployed AI, investor confidence is at an all-time high across these long-term gain-returning schemes.

Governments are well aware that healthy infrastructure is the key to growth, providing sustainable energy and water supplies, as well as delivering on stable and secure societies and economies. For example, the European Investment Bank has pledged a record-high financing of EUR 100 billion in 2025 for various infrastructure sectors, including security, defense, and technological innovation. Notably, EUR 11 billion of that total is dedicated to energy grids and storage to support energy transition and adjacent data center deployment.

Meanwhile, digitization, decarbonization, and globalization are drawing in more private capital. Interest in reducing carbon emissions during operations and clean energy runs high, and investors feel those investments will perform well. However, both government and private entities need some reassurance that they will receive a solid return on investment.

One way to instill confidence is to establish a digital operating environment at the beginning of projects, supported by infrastructure digital twins. In early phases of development, these clear visualizations will help investors understand what they’re funding, and what they will get in terms of an asset and its likely operating costs. The infrastructure digital twin helps organize and optimize teams throughout the project lifecycle. And, once delivered, digital twins support well-managed and maintained assets, relieving owner and investor concern that something could go wrong down the line.

In addition to providing sound design, best-in-class engineering, modern construction methods, and optimized asset management, digital twins and connected data environments retain economic value throughout the life of an asset, helping to further drive investor confidence and enable data to be held as an intangible asset on balance sheets.

 

AI’s Drive for More Data Centers

Another enabler for infrastructure is the AI and data center boom. Thanks to the rush to adopt AI into many parts of work and everyday life, there’s now an explosion of data center construction to support the new technology. All that development is an increasingly large source of work for the infrastructure sector.

The development doesn’t just stop at building data centers to support complex new technology. It will also require significant new power generation and associated energy infrastructure. Data centers in the EU used between 45 to 65 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2022. That figure could jump to nearly 225 terawatt-hours over the next decade. These data centers will also require continued buildout of fiber networks to instantly transfer all that generated data.

That’s a massive amount of incoming work. But infrastructure isn’t just supporting AI—AI will support infrastructure as well. AI has the potential to revolutionize productivity across all parts of designing, delivering, and managing infrastructure assets

But for all the advantages, AI brings challenges as well. The technology could make cybersecurity threats more sophisticated and cheaper to execute, algorithmic biases can undermine trust, and labor disruption must be managed with care and foresight. Regulation must keep pace. The current regulation gap demands robust frameworks to help infrastructure owners and operators to identify, understand, and mitigate emerging risks.

With wise investment, responsible integration, and thoughtful governance, we won’t just be building infrastructure—we’ll be building the physical and digital foundations for a smarter, more connected, and more resilient future.

 

Organizing with Digital Project Delivery

The final infrastructure enabler is integrated and optimized project delivery. Working on their own, designers, builders, and operators can do fantastic things. But all too often, their work is separate, and work and knowledge don’t get passed along across the full project or asset lifecycle. Designers keep 3D models to themselves and only contribute 2D drawings. Builders don’t discover design clashes until after construction has begun. Operators don’t receive useful data that could help optimize operations. The result is wasted time and money. Too often, projects don’t go wrong, they start wrong.

Fortunately, advances in data and software-enabled project delivery can eliminate these silos, keep things running smoothly, and prevent needless waste. Using open, interconnected applications and platforms can establish a single operating model that can be used throughout the lifecycle of the project. Using the model as a single source of truth can help detect and eliminate construction and operation issues during the design phase, all while individual teams operate within their preferred workflows. Every team can easily collaborate with one another and have immediate access to all project data, helping with decision-making. Smooth, efficient, and end-to-end processes will help teams deliver across scheme design, engineering, construction, and asset management phases.

 

Bringing it All to Life

As an example of how digital delivery can enhance infrastructure development, consider the Hill Dickinson Stadium, the new home for English football club Everton FC. At 52,888 seats and a total cost of GBP 555 million, it was a massive project. Complicating matters further was its location on the abandoned Bramley-Moore Dock in Liverpool, which required filling in the site to a depth of 10 meters with 450,000 cubic meters of sand. At that size and complexity, any problems could quickly snowball into disasters.

Developer Laing O’Rourke decided to get ahead of the game by creating a digital twin of the entire project before construction began. Within that virtual replica, they optimized design and eliminated clashes. Laing O’Rourke then used Bentley SYNCHRO within the digital twin to create 4D construction animations and determine how to efficiently build the stadium on the complex site. By using this single source of data, all teams stayed in close communication while optimizing planning and scheduling. Construction on Hill Dickinson Stadium wrapped up in late August, with Everton winning their first home game against Brighton & Hove 2-0. Successes in every sense!

Infrastructure must evolve to keep up with the needs of a changing world. But with increased sources of funding and growing investor confidence, twinned with demand for energy transition, data centers and innovative, system-wide project delivery processes infrastructure developers have the chance to make more resilient assets, as well as improved performance of their enabling major projects.

Capital, data centers, and optimized digital delivery processes: These three enablers will soon become the lifeblood of designers, builders, and operators for years to come.

 

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Author Bio

Nathan Marsh is the Regional Executive for Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) at Bentley Systems. As the senior leader in the region, he is responsible for the strategy, growth, and success of the EMEA business. He has over 20 years of leadership roles within management consultancy, risk advisory, private equity and corporate finance, engineering, and construction businesses, all focused on the funding, design, delivery, and operation of complex and critical national infrastructure.

Prior to joining Bentley, Nathan served as Chief Digital Officer for FTSE and SEC listed construction businesses, leading the deployment of digital solutions into major infrastructure programmes to create value, reduce risk and improve performance. Nathan led the UK and Europe Digital Transformation teams across ATKINS, improving the impact of technology across engineering programmes. He also served as Smart Cities leader for EY, building propositions and leading growth of this digitally enabled business across the US and Europe. Previously to this, he worked on Transaction Integration assignments. He also built then led EY’s business which designed and delivered smart ticketing solutions for UK city transport networks.

Nathan served as a British army officer for seven years, played professional rugby and is privileged to represent industry on a range of expert panels, advisory boards and committees, tasked with the responsible deployment of advanced and sentient software in complex infrastructure assets. He earned a Bachelor of Science (honours) degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, as well as studying further at Cranfield and Sandhurst.