BlackRock, MGX Make $40 Billion Bet on AI Boom With Aligned Data Centers Deal

(Bloomberg) -- Investors led by BlackRock Inc.’s Global Infrastructure Partners agreed to buy Aligned Data Centers in a $40 billion deal, one of the asset manager’s largest infrastructure investments ever that comes as Wall Street races to claim a stake in the artificial-intelligence boom.

MGX, an AI investment company established by sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Investment Co., will invest alongside GIP, according to a statement Wednesday that confirmed an earlier Bloomberg News report. The buyers are purchasing the company from Macquarie Asset Management, which made its first investment in Aligned in April 2018.

GIP and its partners, which also include Microsoft Corp. and Nvidia Corp., are targeting a major beneficiary of AI spending in the biggest-ever data center transaction. Aligned, which is based in Texas and operates throughout the US and South America, has 50 campuses and 78 data centers under management or in future development, according to its website. 

In January, it landed more than $12 billion in equity and debt commitments from investors including funds managed by Macquarie Asset Management.

The agreement is the latest in a parade of major deals since ChatGPT emerged, as investors vie for exposure to the leaders of a technology with the potential to transform industries and economies.

They’ve piled into infrastructure providers such as chip linchpins Nvidia and SK Hynix Inc., pushed up valuations of startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, and poured capital into all manner of gear suppliers to the AI boom. 

According to a Goldman Sachs report earlier this month, AI-related companies have accounted for $141 billion in corporate credit issuance so far this year, already eclipsing the $127 billion in total debt last year.

BlackRock Partnership

The Aligned deal is the first for a partnership BlackRock set up with its GIP unit, Microsoft and MGX a year ago to invest heavily in AI, data centers and the energy powering the technology. 

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink bought Bayo Ogunlesi’s GIP for $12.5 billion in 2024 to make major infrastructure investments sought by pensions, sovereign wealth funds and other big investors. The AI partnership set a goal of raising $30 billion of equity capital to finance eventually up to $100 billion in investments.

Infrastructure has emerged as a key theme for investors seeking to profit from the AI boom, setting off an arms race among the world’s largest alternative asset managers to acquire the skills necessary to build and operate complex assets like data centers. Blackstone Inc. bought QTS Realty Trust for about $10 billion in 2021 and followed up with the acquisition of AirTrunk at the end of last year.

Blackstone has since poured capital into those businesses, allowing them to significantly expand their pipelines and accelerate developments as they look to cash in on massive demand from the world’s biggest tech firms for processing capacity.

Hyperscale Centers

Aligned’s business is focused on hyperscale centers in the Americas, positioning it to benefit from that demand at a time when the Trump administration has been pushing for tech firms to concentrate their investment on the domestic market. It also has a pipeline of attractive development opportunities, with its land bank enjoying access to “scaled near term power in core markets,” according to the statement.

Founded in 2013, nearly a decade before the generative AI boom, Aligned has long focused on providing custom data centers for businesses, with an emphasis on efficiency and sustainability. 

Data centers — and all the infrastructure, including power supplies to support them — take time.Currently, Aligned has just over 600 megawatts of data center capacity that’s live, with another 700 megawatts of capacity under construction, according to DC Byte, a market intelligence firm that tracks the industry. The combined capacity makes Aligned a “decent-sized operation,” according to DC Byte founder Edward Galvin.

By comparison, CoreWeave Inc., a cloud provider that has struck deals with OpenAI and Nvidia, has 470 megawatts of live capacity, according to public filings, with more planned.

Aligned has not publicly disclosed its sales figures. If it charged about $210 per kilowatt per month, the industry standard for data center pricing according to commercial real estate services firm CBRE, Aligned’s annual revenue would be nearly $1.6 billion. That figure would rise to $3.4 billion, including the capacity under construction.

On its website, Aligned said its customers have included Nutanix Inc., a cloud software company, Datto, an IT provider, as well as an unnamed government agency and multinational fintech company, among others.

Aligned is also developing a new data center in Texas for Lambda Inc., a cloud infrastructure company that’s backed by Nvidia. The data center is still under construction.

Power Grid

BlackRock and Aligned will have to find enough electricity for all the new data centers the two companies want to build. US power demand is surging after being stagnant for decades and data centers are projected to consume more than 4% of the world’s electricity by 2035, according to BloombergNEF.

Tech firms and developers are rushing to secure electricity connections however they can, competing to sign power contracts with utilities and independent power producers. BlackRock made a big move into that space earlier this month when it won approval from Minnesota regulators for its $6 billion acquisition of utility Allete Inc.

BlackRock has also been exploring a deal to acquire power company AES Corp., people familiar with the matter said earlier this month.

The GIP deal is expected to close in the first half of next year, according to the statement. The full acquiring consortium — dubbed the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership — also includes the Kuwait Investment Authority and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings Pte, according to a separate statement Wednesday. 

The surge in valuations has worried some market observers who argue that, while data center spending and construction is accelerating, AI services have yet to go mainstream and earn the revenue needed to justify the near-unprecedented capital expenditure. 

GIP already owns Dallas-based data center company CyrusOne with KKR & Co. The two firms took CyrusOne private in a deal that closed in 2022 and valued the company at about $15 billion.

“AIP is positioned to meet the growing demand for the infrastructure required as AI continues to reshape the global economy,” BlackRock’s Fink said. 

Macquarie has been investing in digital infrastructure including data center operators, towers and fiber networks for years. It sold another data center operator, AirTrunk, to Blackstone Inc. for A$24 billion ($15.6 billion) in 2024. 

Other recent deals include Meta Platforms Inc. raising $29 billion in a financing package for a data center in Louisiana. Oracle Corp. raised $18 billion in bonds as it builds cloud infrastructure.

Guggenheim Securities acted as lead financial adviser to the sellers, while Morgan Stanley advised the buyers.

(Updates with advisers in 28th paragraph.)

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