Peter Lewis

Chairman, Founder at Wharton Equity

Speaker

Mr. Lewis is Chairman and Founder of New York–based Wharton Equity Partners, a real estate and private equity investment firm established in 1987. Since inception, he has been the driving force behind the firm’s evolution as a forward-thinking, opportunistic investor, consistently positioning capital ahead of major technological and macroeconomic shifts across both real estate and private equity.

For nearly four decades, Mr. Lewis has led investments in a broad range of real estate asset classes, including industrial, office, hospitality, residential, and self-storage. The firm combines deep operational expertise with institutional capital-markets discipline, guided by a consistent philosophy of pursuing differentiated strategies outside of prevailing market consensus. In parallel, Mr. Lewis expanded the firm’s private equity activities into growth investments in companies focused on logistics, automation, and big-data analytics.

More recently, Mr. Lewis founded Wharton Digital, a platform which invests across real estate, private equity, and venture capital with a common focus on opportunities that are being materially shaped by the rapid advancement and adoption of artificial intelligence. Through Wharton Digital, the firm co-founded LightHouse

Data Centers, a turnkey data center development company led by two former senior executives from Amazon Web Services, where they collectively executed more than $10 billion of transactions. An affiliate of Wharton Digital is a major shareholder of LightHouse Data Centers, and Mr. Lewis serves as Chairman of the Board. Mr. Lewis received a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He is a frequent industry speaker and guest lecturer and is actively involved as a mentor with organizations including the Urban Land Institute, Columbia University, and the Wharton School.