Invest Europe Leader Interviews: Gabriele Todesca, European Investment Fund (EIF)

Infrastructure investments are key to position Europe for the challenges that we're facing today and in the foreseeable future.

I'm Gabriel Todesca. I'm responsible for infrastructure investments at uh European Investment Fund. European Investment Fund is one of the leading uh private assets investors in Europe.

We are a specific type of investor because we are very much focused on policy as well as financial returns. Our investors are mostly public sector investors like the European Investment Bank, the European Commission, National Government. So EU and others.

We also have private investors. But what brings them together is that they have of course financial interests but also policy interest. The policy interests are reflected in the type of activities that we pursue under all our private markets investments but particularly under infrastructure investments.

Our key areas of focus for this year are mainly three areas. Number one, energy where we're investing in renewable generation, storage, distribution, but we're more and more trying to focus on how can we use the energy we produce more cleverly.

So things like uh storage, things like energy efficiency, how can we save energy and not just produce more? The number two is on digital infrastructure where what we're trying to do is we're investing in data centers, towers, fiber networks. But the reason why we do it is we want to be able from a policy perspective, we want to position the European Union as competitively as possible in the world race for technology and particularly for artificial intelligence.

The third topic where we're focusing this year is how can we make Europe more socially fair and inclusive. We're investing more and more into social infrastructure, which means things like hospitals and educational facilities, but also and increasingly into housing. In addition to these three key areas, we're also more and more trying to focus on defense as a as an investment theme. for infrastructure.

We're looking at that more and more actively and uh we're hoping that we try to find good investment opportunities in the near future. Infrastructure investments are key to position Europe for the challenges that we're facing today and in the foreseeable future.