Business
A BlackRock-led $40 billion data center deal highlights the unstoppable AI gold rush
Today’s announcement that a group of investors led by BlackRock has agreed to buy Aligned Data Centers in a $40 billion deal underscores the seemingly unstoppable flow of money into AI data centers—and comes as its CEO, Larry Fink, pushes back on AI bubble fears.
The deal to buy Aligned, which is is owned by Macquarie Asset Management, is being inked by the AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP)—a coalition formed in September 2024 by BlackRock, its infrastructure arm Global Infrastructure Partners, as well as Microsoft, Nvidia, and MGX, an AI investment firm backed by Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala. The Kuwait Investment Authority, xAI and Temasek joined as additional participants.
The AIP was formed to invest up to $30 billion of equity capital in AI, data centers and energy; this is its first deal, which ranks as one of BlackRock’s largest infrastructure investments to date. If completed, it would be among the largest data center transactions on record, and regardless it underscores how Wall Street is racing to claim a stake in the AI boom.
Fink has rejected the idea that AI infrastructure spending represents a dangerous bubble, arguing that massive data center build-outs are essential if the U.S. is to remain the global leader. “Well, there’s a bubble in investing,” he said on CNBC Squawk Box yesterday. “But are we inferring a bubble means a bad thing? There is certainly a skyrocketing amount of capital being put to work. If you put it in a framework of geopolitical positioning, we as a country need these investments if we’re going to be the leader in AI technology.”
Aligned Data Centers, which is based in Plano, Texas, was founded in 2013 to build and operate data centers for hyperscalers and cloud-computing companies. It has data centers across the U.S.—including in Northern Virginia, Chicago, Dallas, Ohio, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City—as well as in Mexico, Brazil, and Chile.
The timing of the deal comes as big tech firms race to secure scarce land, power, and compute capacity—the foundational resources underpinning the AI race. For example, over the past few weeks, OpenAI has announced multibillion-dollar deals with Broadcom, Nvidia, and AMD in order to lock in the computing power the company needs.
“We cannot fall behind in the need to put the infrastructure together to make this revolution happen,” Altman told reporters during a media event at OpenAI and Oracle’s flagship 800-acre Stargate data center location in Abilene, Texas last month, where he also announced the companies will build five massive, new data center complexes across the U.S. over the next several years.
OpenAI is far from alone: Microsoft has made several multibillion-dollar deals in the past two months with U.K.-based data center developer Nscale, including the announcement today of a new site in Texas that will have capacity of as much as 240 megawatts of power. Also today, Meta announced it would invest $1.5 billion in an AI data center in El Paso, Texas that could scale to 1 gigawatt, making it one of the largest planned data center campuses in the U.S.
The total numbers are staggering: On a recent earnings call, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang estimated that between $3 trillion and $4 trillion will be spent on AI infrastructure by the end of the decade. And McKinsey said U.S. data center demand, driven largely by A.I., could triple by 2030, and require data centers to make nearly $7 trillion in investment to keep up.
