Consortium of heavyweight investors includes Nvidia, Microsoft, Temasek, MGX, xAI, and Kuwait Investment Authority
In sum – what to know:
Largest deal of its kind. BlackRock says $40 billion is the starting point to what it believes can turn into $80 billion to $100 billion in capital raised.
Major capital backing. Investing are heavyweights like xAI, MGX, Kuwait Investment Authority, Singapore-based Temasek, and American companies Microsoft and Nvidia.
Focus on infrastructure. The deal focuses on expanding Aligned Data Centers, which currently include 50 facilities across North America and Latin America.
In one of the biggest data-center acquisitions in history, BlackRock‘s consortium of high-profile investors will buy Macquarie-owned Aligned Data Centers in a $40 billion deal that might just be the tip of the iceberg, with goals to raise $80 billion $100 billion through BlackRock’s AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), which now includes:
- Elon Musk’s xAI;
- UAE-based MGX, which has the backing of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala;
- The Kuwait Investment Authority;
- Singapore-based investment firm Temasek;
- Microsoft (which recently partnered with OpenAI and is AI-enabling its Azure cloud platform and software);
- Semiconductor giant Nvidia (whose partner OpenAI has made $1 trillion-dollars worth of deals this year, including the $500 billion Stargate Project with Oracle and SoftBank).
This deal differs from those of Nvidia and Microsoft in that its focus is infrastructure, as opposed to technology or service, with a focus on AI and energy infrastructure expansion. Aligned Data Centers currently has 50 facilities, which generate more than five gigawatts of operational and planned capacity across the United States, Quebec City in Canada and several Latin American countries.
As noted last week, this is the latest in a trend of circular deals and staggering dollar amounts that have become “normalized” in the AI gold rush. It wasn’t long ago that a $4 trillion valuation for a company seemed high, but now analysts like Cantor Fitzgerald analyst C.J. Muse portend a company like Nvidia could reach a market value of $7.3 trillion by 2027 (currently sitting at $4.7 trillion).
This acquisition of Aligned is the latest in a series of huge deals involving the largest players from Big Tech to Silicon Valley, with Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, CoreWeave and others spending in excess of $400 billion for AI infrastructure this year.