When UVA alumni Amit Rikhy returned to Grounds for a visit earlier this month, he brought with him a case study in how to scale innovative financing for major infrastructure projects. As president and CEO of Carlyle Airport Group Holdings, LLC, Rikhy has led the effort to secure $9.5 billion for the redevelopment of Terminal One at New York City’s JFK International Airport — the largest aviation public-private partnership in U.S. history.
Rikhy was the guest speaker at Batten Hour earlier this month. He offered students a rare inside look at how blended finance — mixing philanthropic, public, and private capital — can deliver transformative infrastructure.
“Why has this public-private partnership been so successful?” Rikhy reflected. “It really was about solving the needs of the community, solving the needs of a public agency for New York City and New York State. It was a partnership that was completely aligned and had aligned incentives throughout.”
Why airports, why now
“What we’re seeing here in the U.S. is this real need for our airports to modernize,” he said. “The American Society of Civil Engineers and the Airports Council International–North America estimate that over $150 billion of investment is needed to modernize U.S. airports, to develop and expand capacity.”
JFK’s existing Terminal One has served about eight million passengers annually across just 10 gates. By contrast, the new facility will be the largest stand-alone terminal in the U.S and serve some 20 million passengers across 23 gates, Rikhy said.
The project began in 2018, only to stall in early 2020 as COVID shut down global air travel. His team reworked phasing to align construction with the recovery of passenger demand. Phase A, now underway, will deliver the first 14 gates by 2026. Phase B will add nine more gates by 2029.
A new era of air travel
The design of New Terminal One puts people at the center. Arriving passengers will enter a skylit hall instead of a dark corridor, while departing passengers will have fully covered curbside access with advanced traffic management and biometric-enabled check-in and boarding.
Inside, travelers will find retail districts inspired by Fifth Avenue, SoHo, and Broadway, along with a Central Park-style green space, Rikhy said, and New York artists will be showcased throughout the terminal. “We wanted a real sense of place, something that feels iconically New York.”
The new terminal will also environmentally sustainable, he said, and will target both LEED and Envision certifications. Powered by a first-of-its-kind microgrid, it will include approximately 11,000 rooftop solar panels and battery storage, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 38%, and be able to operate off-grid around-the-clock if needed, Rikhy said.
“The Port Authority challenged us, ‘Make sure it’s resilient, make sure it’s sustainable, make sure it’s cost predictable,’ ” Rikhy said. “And that’s exactly what this microgrid does.”
His sights are also set on a milestone no U.S. airport has yet achieved, he said — earning a five-star rating from Skytrax, the global airport benchmarking organization. His team studied airports in Singapore, Doha, Paris, and Munich. “We looked at what they did well and tried to bring all of that learning back into how we were going to transform this customer journey.”
Stakeholders at the center
From the start, Rikhy said, the challenge was to minimize risk while meeting the goals of multiple and varied stakeholders. “Every successful public-private partnership begins and ends with stakeholders. Not stockholders, stakeholders,” he emphasized. His team identified four core stakeholder groups:
- Airlines, which needed more gates to serve the growing number of passengers;
- The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which sought expedited delivery, strict oversight, and zero impact on its credit ratings;
- Labor, secured by partnering with Union Labor Life Insurance which invested union pension funds directly in the project; and
- The surrounding community, where the project awarded $594 million in local contracts and $1.2 billion to minority- and women-owned businesses (MWBEs), the largest such allocation ever for a U.S. infrastructure project, Rikhy said.
“We kept the stakeholders at the very center of this project,” Rikhy noted. “That community never wavered. That community continued to support us, continued to support the project.”
Financing and innovation
The numbers behind JFK’s Terminal One are as ambitious as the design. Phase One was financed with $2.3 billion in equity, nearly half from MWBE and labor investors, Rikhy said, and another $6.6 billion came from bank financing. In 2025, the entire amount was refinanced, with 30% of underwriting allocated to MWBE investment banks, he said.
“Our financing structure had to be product agnostic, it had to be timing agnostic,” he explained. “We had to create a structure that allowed us to be flexible and nimble, depending on what the markets threw at us.”
For students interested in innovative finance, Rikhy’s case study brought the abstract into focus. It showed how blended capital, phased delivery, and careful stakeholder alignment can unlock projects too large for traditional funding models.
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