Thought Pieces

Deep dive: Britain’s Digital Network and its Spluttering Connectivity

15 January 2026

The UK, despite a clear focus on developing its digital networks, suffers from often poor connectivity across the country. It is perhaps surprising, given the level of development and the continued attention placed on the UK’s digital networks. While blame can be cast on several factors, investment, policy decisions and the UK’s natural and manmade landscape, within these points lurks a pervasive and self-perpetuating theme. A fundamental disconnect between connectivity ambition, policy aims and business realities. Given our growing demand for connectivity, this issue must be addressed to enable the UK to lead in the digital age.

Deep dive: Structuring Energy Transition Investments and Deploying Flexible Capital Solutions

16 December 2025

The energy transition is accelerating at pace, bringing both opportunity and complexity for developers and investors. As variable renewable energy becomes a dominant part of electricity systems, traditional financing models that were designed around predictable, baseload generation are starting to struggle. Cordiant’s Harrison Parkes examines how financing solutions are evolving to align with market developments and Cordiant’s approach to acting as a strategic partner, not simply a lender.

Rethinking Commodity Diversification: Beyond Correlations and Linear Metrics

3 December 2025

Conventional investment practice sees commodities as portfolio diversifiers and/or inflation hedges. Yet we believe that there are at least two key issuing undermining this view, financialisation and the overreliance on liner statistics in portfolio construction. Thiago Gil proposes a different angle to consider the commodity-diversification puzzle. In his latest article, he examines these two issues and highlights the importance of identifying the core goal for investing in commodities to enable the use of right analytical tools before committing capital.

Blurred Lines: Infrastructure, Real Estate, and the Rise of Hybrid Assets

28 November 2025

The lines between traditional infrastructure and real estate are increasingly blurred. Driven by digital transformation, sectors are evolving and becoming more interconnected, making standalone assets harder to classify and challenging long-held assumptions about risk and return. This shift is most evident in the rise of data centres as a hybrid asset class. In his article, Haig Bezian uses data centres to illustrate this convergence, highlight remaining distinctions, and examine the resulting impact on capital markets.

Celebrating Nature Stewardship in Agriculture

27 November 2025

Earlier this month, our ESG Senior Associate, Melissa Paris St-Amour, visited our portfolio company Yarabamba and witnessed firsthand how they’re transforming nature stewardship into action. Through an inspiring partnership with a local conservation hero, today Yarabamba its planting its one millionth trees – restoring ecosystems while building resilient agricultural practices.

Beyond 2°C: Managing Agricultural Climate Risk

24 October 2025

For years there has been a focus on climate change’s 2°C maximum temperature increase threshold as a key metric in climate change policy. It is likely that this will guide negotiations at the upcoming COP30 on agricultural adaptation and food security, one of the major strategic themes of this year’s conference. However, the justifiably intense focus on 2°C threshold often comes at the expense of preparing for “near-catastrophe” conditions. In sectors particularly vulnerable to climate crises, such as agriculture, this can lead to key, asymmetric risks being overlooked.

Finding the Efficient Frontier in Data Centre Investing

3 October 2025

Whilst AI and hyperscale demand continue to dominate the mindshare across the data centre industry, at Cordiant, we see the strongest investment opportunities in wholesale and retail colocation. This sub-segment of the data centre space is particularly well-suited to mid-market investors, where disciplined capital deployment can balance risk and unlock superior returns.  

The Hot Topic of Data Centres – Data Centres Demystified Series

26 September 2025

Building the Infrastructure of the Future, Pioneering Sustainability in Practice.
While there are real sustainability concerns within the data centre sector, it is rapidly evolving. These developments and recent efforts show that sustainability is not only possible but increasingly embedded in operational practices.

The Hot Topic of Data Centres – Data Centres Demystified Series

15 September 2025

The Real Challenges and Considerations –
Data centres are often portrayed as energy-hungry, water-thirsty, environmentally unsustainable facilities, and even a potential health risks. While these criticisms sometimes hold kernels of truth, they are frequently oversimplified or misunderstood.

In the second article of this series, we take a closer look at common claims, separate myths from reality, and highlight the real challenges that lie beneath them.

The Hot Topic of Data Centres – Data Centres Demystified Series

3 September 2025

The Infrastructure Powering Our Digital Lives – Data centres are a hot topic, from the scale and growth of the sector to concerns around the environmental cost and power required to run more of them. By the end of 2025, global data centres consumption is projected to reach as much as 23 gigawatts of power, twice the energy consumed by the Netherlands. With the increasing need for compute power and consequently data centres, what are the challenges they pose, what needs debunking and are there ways we can we use them responsibly, scaling with sustainability in mind? These are the questions our series sets out to answer, starting with – what exactly is a data centre and how do they work.