Laurence Fink, chairman and chief executive of BlackRock, said the need to create a new financing vehicle for compute is imperative for the U.S. to build out to the necessary scale.

Fink said on the third quarter results call on 14 October 2026 that the asset manager has long-standing relationships with hyperscalers – large-scale cloud providers or data center operators – sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and corporate clients which underpin some of the largest financing engagements in the market.

BlackRock has a strategy built around an integrated public and private market platform, underpinned by Aladdin, its investment technology platform. Fink highlighted that this is the first time that BlackRock has been operating for a full year with Preqin, a private markets data provider, Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), and private credit manager HPS Investment Partners.

The acquisition of Preqin was completed in March 2025 to serve clients’ whole portfolios across public and private markets by combining investment, technology, and data solutions in one platform. BlackRock completed its acquisition of GIP in 2024 and of HPS on 1 July 2025.

“This quarter is the clearest view yet of the earnings power of our integrated platform,” said Fink.

Private markets had $15bn of net inflows in the third quarter, mainly from deployment across infrastructure and private credit, and the onboarding of a real estate mandate. BlackRock has raised $68bn in private markets over the last twelve months, and the firm’s AI infrastructure partnership made its first deployment in the third quarter.

The manager raised $25bn in private credit in its first full year with HPS. The firm is seeing strong traction with insurance companies rotating or adding to high-grade solutions, according to Fink.

He said that for the first time in his career of more than 50 years, he is seeing genuine shortages of capital as governments run historically large deficits while needing financing for infrastructure, companies need to fund a “generational” AI buildout, and individuals need better ways to invest and retire.

For example, BlackRock partnered with Meta on financing its planned $14bn data center in Texas, bringing together infrastructure investments from GIP and private financing capabilities from HPS.

“We are also working alongside leading technology companies to create dedicated pools of financing for their customers to expand compute capabilities and capacity in the near term,” added Fink. “These can supply private placements into high-grade insurance mandates, but over time, there’s an even larger opportunity to securitize them into tradable structures for a much broader set of clients.”

In the early 1980s Fink and Rob Kapito, president of BlackRock, were at the beginning of the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market and he expects compute capacity to follow a similar path. Fink highlighted that mortgages only became tradable once data, years of performance history, and an understanding of how performance would move with interest rates and the broader economy became available.

“Once investors had a trusted time series of data, issuers had a standard to build against, and the market opened up for a much bigger group of investors,” he added. “That combination took the MBS market from a few billion dollars when I started to the trillions of dollars it is today.”

He claimed that BlackRock is particularly well positioned to help develop this market because the firm combines capital formation, technology, data and scale.  As compute capacity emerges as an asset class the markets will need trusted data, standardized performance metrics, and a common framework for risk analytics. Fink said these are capabilities that BlackRock has been building for decades.

He expects it will take time to put the data and analytics in place for this new market, amnd for ratings agencies to provide opinions but said compute is a “huge priority.”

“It is a large opportunity for GPU financing for our HPS team,” said Fink. “It is a large opportunity for our GIP team in terms of the building out data centers.”

As private markets become a larger part of client portfolios, the need for transparency, risk management, and portfolio analytics can only increase according to Fink. He said: “That’s a natural extension of Aladdin’s role as an operating system for entire portfolios for investors worldwide.”

Performance fees of $630m in the third quarter increased 22% from a year ago, which BlackRock said primarily reflects higher revenue from alternatives, including $110m of performance fees from HPS.

ETFs

iShares, BlackRock’s ETF franchise, generated $135bn of net inflows in the third quarter. Index bond ETFs led the way with $61bn  of net inflows as investors shifted into the long and short end of the curve.

There was also strong demand for AI-linked exposures, said Fink, as the semiconductor and South Korea ETFs were among the products with the highest inflows. Digital asset ETPs raised $8bn in the third quarter.

iShares is leading the industry with $60bn of active ETF inflows in 2026, including a record $22bn in the third quarter, according to Fink. He continued that IShare’s active assets under management have doubled in the last year to more than $160bn. Active ETFs are already tracking ahead of the $500m in added revenue that was set as a target in the 2030 strategy.

Martin Small, chief financial officer at BlackRock, said on the call: “Our ETFs have now delivered a sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit organic base fee growth, powered by higher-value ETF categories such as active and precision.”

Financials

BlackRock reported $15.5 trillion in assets under management as at 30 September 2026. This followed $869bn of net inflows over the last twelve months, which represented 10% organic base fee growth.

In the third quarter of this year, BlackRock had $205bn of net inflows and 11% annualized organic base fee growth. The firm said this reflected  broad-based strength across iShares ETFs, systematic active equities, private markets, and cash.

Fink said: “We generated net inflows across every asset class, every client type, every region and across both active and index.”

Small added that the firm’s 2030 plan at last year’s Investor Day set a strategy to drive growth in higher value, higher base fee rate categories. Growth broadened across active ETFs, private markets, systematic SMAs (separately managed accounts), digital assets, and technology.

He does not believe that the investment environment can be described as risk-on or risk-off as the new environment is about capital allocation acumen.

“Our industry is being reshaped by the blending of public and private markets and growing demand for technology and data to secure success in client portfolios,” Small added. “These conditions play directly to BlackRock’s strengths.”

BlackRock delivered double-digit growth in revenue, operating income, and earnings per share, with all three measures reaching new records. There was a 19% year-over-year increase in third quarter revenue to $7.8bn.

Fink continued that foreign investment is moving into U.S. equities and funds in record amounts, with a third of BlackRock’s long-term net inflows coming from clients outside the United States. Fink said this is even more pronounced in systematic equity, where more than 70% of the net inflows are coming from international clients.

“BlackRock’s results demonstrate the value of our integrated platform, as clients increasingly choose us as a partner across investing, financing, and technology,” added Fink. “That client trust is translating into higher earnings power, with shareholders benefiting from a more than 35% increase in adjusted earnings per share year-over-year, a 47.8% adjusted operating margin, and 11% annualized organic base fee growth in the third quarter.”