Nvidia, Microsoft, and BlackRock Join Forces in $40 Billion Data Center Power Play

With input from CNBC, Reuters, Bloomberg, and the Hill.

The AI boom just sparked its biggest infrastructure deal yet. A heavyweight group of investors — including Nvidia, Microsoft, Elon Musk’s xAI, and BlackRock — has agreed to buy Aligned Data Centers in a blockbuster $40 billion deal, marking the largest data center acquisition ever.

The deal, announced Wednesday, will see MGX of Abu Dhabi, BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners, and members of the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership (AIP) take full ownership of Aligned from Macquarie Asset Management, which first backed the company in 2018.

AIP itself is still a relatively new player — it was formed just last year by BlackRock, MGX, Microsoft, and Nvidia to fast-track investments in the digital backbone of artificial intelligence. The group’s goal is to deploy at least $30 billion in equity and potentially as much as $100 billion when factoring in debt. The Aligned deal is AIP’s first major move, and it’s a big one.

Aligned, based in Dallas, runs massive data campuses across the US and Latin America — including sites in Virginia, Chicago, Phoenix, and São Paulo — with more than 5 gigawatts of current and planned capacity. Its facilities provide the kind of high-density computing power needed to train and run large AI models, something that’s increasingly in short supply as tech giants race to expand capacity.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who also chairs AIP, said the investment underscores the consortium’s aim to “deliver the infrastructure necessary to power the future of AI.” Translation: they’re betting big that the next wave of tech growth will be built on whoever controls the energy and computing hubs behind AI systems.

It’s also a sign that the world’s most powerful companies — from Wall Street to Silicon Valley — are racing to secure the real estate and energy needed to keep the AI revolution running. Nvidia, whose chips already power much of the world’s AI workloads, is extending its influence deeper into the supply chain. Microsoft, meanwhile, has been on a data-center building spree to support its cloud and OpenAI partnerships.

The deal comes amid a frenzy of AI infrastructure spending. OpenAI and Nvidia recently unveiled a $100 billion plan to add 10 gigawatts of data-center computing capacity, while Meta and Oracle have raised tens of billions to build or finance their own server farms. Global dealmaking for AI-related infrastructure has surged past $1 trillion this year, according to Bloomberg data.

Aligned’s CEO Andrew Schaap will stay on to lead the company, which will keep its Dallas headquarters. The transaction, still subject to regulatory approval, is expected to close in the first half of 2026.

For investors like BlackRock and MGX, the payoff could be enormous — data centers are becoming the most critical (and expensive) real estate in the digital economy. For tech giants like Nvidia and Microsoft, it’s about securing the power and bandwidth to keep AI growing at full throttle.

If there’s one thing this $40 billion bet makes clear, it’s that in the AI gold rush, the new land grab isn’t for chips or code — it’s for the power plants and server farms that make it all run.