- Aligned Data Centers and its portfolio of 50 facilities is being acquired by a consortium of high-profile investors
- The move is the latest by investment firms to scoop up critical tech infrastructure
- The deal could accelerate Aligned's expansion efforts
The award for crazy giant AI infrastructure deal of the week goes, not to Oracle (which has been on a roll lately) or OpenAI, Google or Amazon, but instead to Aligned Data Centers. The data center provider, which has hitherto been owned by private equity firm Macquarie Asset Management, is being scooped up by a group of investors including BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), Nvidia, Microsoft and United Arab Emirate state-backed investment firm MGX for a cool $40 billion.
Nvidia and Microsoft are participating in the deal via the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership, which was founded late last year to fuel construction of AI infrastructure.
Though not a household name like the hyperscale cloud giants, Aligned is a power player in its own right. The company’s portfolio includes 50 campuses scattered across nine U.S. states and four countries in Latin America. And its expansion continues to roll, leaving it will a combined planned and operational capacity of more than 5 gigawatts.
In July, the company announced plans to build its third data center campus in Ohio, with initial capacity scheduled to be online by mind-2026. The following month, its Latin American arm ODATA launched its fourth data center campus in Mexico. Earlier in the year it lit up a new data center in Brazil and inked a deal to supply neocloud provider Lambda with compute power from its newest Dallas-Fort Worth campus.
It seems likely the acquisition – particularly by such a mix of high-profile investors and industry insiders with deep pockets – will supercharge Aligned’s expansion plans.
“With AIP, MGX, and GIP’s global reach, extensive resources, and deep expertise across AI, energy, and finance, we are poised to scale faster, innovate further, and redefine what’s possible in sustainable data center infrastructure,” Andrew Schaap, CEO of Aligned Data Centers, said in a statement.
Fierce has asked the company for more detail about how the deal will impact its strategy going forward and will update this story when we hear back.
Private equity takeover
The deal is the latest in a series of moves by private equity and state-backed investment initiatives to lock down tech and telecom infrastructure.
Since at least 2019, investment firms including I Squared Capital, Stonepeak, EQT Infrastructure, KKR, Grain Management and BlackRock have been quietly (or not) scooping up data center and related networking assets.
BlackRock bought infrastructure management firm GIP (yes, the same from above) last year, netting it a major stake in CyrusOne, which operates over 50 data centers. In September, it also announced plans to invest more than $600 million (£500 million) to update data centers in the U.K. and equip them with Nvidia gear.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink argued in a recent letter to investors that deals like the one with GIP are a way of connecting much-needed capital with a capex-heavy industry. But the move isn’t altruistic.
Fink noted money BlackRock’s clients will help “fuel the rise of this century’s defining technology—and reap its returns.”
And it’s certainly no surprise to find that BlackRock and others are investing in energy assets to serve their power-starved AI investments. But that’s a story for a different day.
$40 billion bucks
The $40 billion deal to buy Aligned is one of the largest in the AI Infrastructure space and is the latest in a series of AI-related announcements featuring hard-to-believe numbers.
Other notable transactions in this vein include Nvidia and OpenAI’s $100 billion deployment deal; CoreWeave’s series of OpenAI contracts worth a combined $22.4 billion; OpenAI’s multi-year $300 billion commitment to purchase compute power from Oracle; and AMD’s deal with OpenAI that the former’s CEO said could generate well over $100 billion over the life of the contract.
The Aligned deal is admittedly different. While many of the aforementioned numbers could fail to materialize, it seems BlackRock is actually buying existing physical assets.