A newly formed investment group consisting of BlackRock, Nvidia, xAI, Microsoft and others will acquire Aligned Data Centers in a $40 billion deal, the companies announced Wednesday. This move will spur increased land grabbing for infrastructure to support the development of artificial intelligence.
The consortium, called the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), plans to initially commit $30 billion in equity capital and potentially invest up to $100 billion in debt. This is the group’s first deal and shows what the central data infrastructure will look like in the next stage of AI development.
Aligned designs and operates data centers for clients including hyperscalers, enterprise companies, and emerging cloud providers. The company manages 50 campuses in the United States and Latin America, with more than 5 gigawatts of operating and planned capacity, including properties in development.
The acquisition comes amid a scramble to secure the computing power needed for AI workloads. Last month, Nebius Group signed a five-year deal to supply GPUs worth $17.4 billion to Microsoft. Around the same time, CoreWeave reached a $6.3 billion deal with Nvidia to secure unused server space.
The deal with Alignment is expected to close in the first half of 2026.
Stock prices of Bitcoin mining companies, especially those that have shifted their business models to AI infrastructure, continue to rise. During early trading. Hut 8 Corp (HUT), IREN (IREN), Bitfarms (BITF), and CleanSpark (CLSK) led in the 3%-6% range.
