A consortium anchored by BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners, the AI Infrastructure Partnership and sovereign fund MGX has completed the acquisition of 100% of the equity in Aligned Data Centers, valuing the digital infrastructure developer at roughly $40 billion. The deal, sold by private infrastructure funds managed by Macquarie Asset Management, stands as one of the largest private transactions in the history of digital infrastructure and underscores how aggressively capital is flowing into the physical backbone of the AI boom even as questions swirl about whether AI spending overall is outpacing demand.
Who Is Behind the Deal
The buying group traces back to the AI Infrastructure Partnership, or AIP, which BlackRock, MGX, Microsoft and Nvidia formed in September 2024 specifically to funnel capital into AI and data infrastructure projects. Since then, the roster of participants has grown: the Kuwait Investment Authority, Elon Musk’s xAI and Singapore’s Temasek have all joined as additional investors in the vehicle. AIP was originally structured to mobilize $30 billion in initial capital, with AIP, GIP and MGX later agreeing to commit an additional $5 billion to support further expansion of the platform.
What Aligned Brings to the Table
Aligned Data Centers has built a reputation as one of the fastest-growing developers in the sector, with a portfolio spanning 51 campuses and more than 6.4 gigawatts of operational and planned capacity across North and South America. The company’s design emphasizes rapid, modular buildouts that can be adapted to different power and cooling requirements, a feature that has made it attractive to hyperscale cloud operators and AI labs racing to secure computing capacity wherever they can find it. For the consortium, buying an established developer with a large land and power pipeline is faster than building new sites from scratch in a market where suitable land, transmission access and power purchase agreements have become the scarcest resources in the entire AI supply chain.
A Symptom of the Infrastructure Land Rush
The Aligned deal is part of a broader pattern of large investors racing to lock up data center capacity and the underlying real estate and power needed to run it. Real estate firms and private equity investors have been described by industry publications as engaged in a ‘powered land’ gold rush, competing to option sites with existing or plannable electrical interconnection before rivals do. Analysts tracking the sector say the involvement of sovereign wealth funds like Kuwait’s and Singapore’s alongside a chipmaker, a cloud provider and an AI startup in a single financing vehicle reflects how blurred the lines between AI compute providers, financiers and customers have become.
Bulls See a Durable Infrastructure Play
Supporters of the deal argue that regardless of how the debate over AI valuations shakes out, physical data center capacity, land and power access will remain valuable for years, making Aligned’s asset base a relatively durable bet compared to investments tied more directly to any single AI model or company’s fortunes. They note that Microsoft and Nvidia’s continued involvement in AIP signals confidence that demand for compute capacity will keep growing even if spending patterns among individual AI labs shift.
Skeptics Warn of Concentration Risk
Critics counter that pouring tens of billions of dollars into a small number of mega-deals concentrates risk among a handful of overlapping investors and could leave the consortium exposed if AI infrastructure demand cools faster than expected. Some infrastructure analysts have also raised concerns about how much leverage is being used across these deals, and whether power availability — rather than capital — will ultimately be the binding constraint that determines how much of Aligned’s planned 6.4 gigawatts of capacity actually gets built and energized on schedule.
Looking Ahead
With the transaction now closed, attention shifts to execution: how quickly Aligned’s pipeline of campuses can secure power interconnections, how the consortium’s various commercial members — including Microsoft and Nvidia — will prioritize access to the new capacity, and whether additional sovereign or strategic investors join AIP in future rounds. The deal is likely to fuel further consolidation among data center developers as investors conclude that scale and an existing land bank are worth paying a premium for in a market where new sites are increasingly hard to find. Analysts expect similar consortium-style acquisitions to follow, as fewer independent developers with Aligned’s scale remain available and strategic buyers increasingly prefer to co-invest through vehicles like AIP rather than bid against one another directly for the same scarce assets.