BlackRock, Nvidia, Microsoft Lead $40B AI Data Center Acquisition

A newly formed investment consortium, the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), will acquire Aligned Data Centers in a $40 billion deal, the companies announced Wednesday. The acquisition marks AIP’s first transaction as it targets the rapidly expanding AI infrastructure market.

The group, which includes BlackRock, Nvidia, xAI, Microsoft, and others, plans to deploy $30 billion in equity initially and could invest up to $100 billion including debt. The deal underscores the growing importance of data center capacity for AI workloads.

Aligned operates and designs data centers for hyperscalers, enterprises, and emerging cloud providers. The company controls 50 campuses across the U.S. and Latin America, offering more than 5 gigawatts of operating and planned capacity, including developments still underway.

The acquisition comes amid an industry-wide rush to secure AI compute power. Last month, Nebius Group signed a five-year agreement to supply Microsoft with $17.4 billion in GPUs, while CoreWeave reached a $6.3 billion deal with Nvidia to reserve unused server capacity.

The Aligned transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2026.

Shares of bitcoin mining firms, particularly those pivoting toward AI infrastructure, have continued to rise. Early trading saw Hut 8 Corp (HUT), IREN (IREN), Bitfarms (BITF), and CleanSpark (CLSK) climb between 3% and 6%.