Is BlackRock’s $40B Bet on Aligned Making the U.S. the Epicenter of AI Infrastructure?
The $40B Aligned acquisition signals a new era where finance, power, and compute converge to define the U.S.’s leadership in AI infrastructure.
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The Deal That Could Rewire U.S. AI Leadership
When Bloomberg revealed that BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) was closing in on Aligned, markets perked up. But beneath the sticker shock lies a deeper play: controlling the full power pathway of AI.
GIP is reportedly eyeing AES Corp., a $38B utility, alongside Aligned. Together, these assets would give BlackRock leverage over both the supply and demand sides of AI compute a level of integration few rivals can match.
A decade ago, data centers were quiet backbones of the internet. Today, they are the strategic choke points of the AI era.
Why Aligned, Why Now
Aligned isn’t a run-of-the-mill colocation operator. Since its founding in 2013, it has expanded at breakneck speed, building a footprint of 78 facilities across 50 campuses, with 600 MW live and over 5 GW in development.
Its modular, liquid-cooled, zero-water infrastructure was designed for AI workloads before most of the industry caught up. For GIP, this isn’t about quarterly returns—it’s about locking up energized megawatts, the scarcest resource of the next decade.
If the deal closes, it will rank among 2025’s top five global M&A transactions, eclipsing some sovereign energy acquisitions.
Power Is the Real Bottleneck
The biggest constraint in AI infrastructure isn’t GPUs it’s electricity.
By pairing Aligned’s data center network with AES’s generation and transmission assets, BlackRock could control the full power chain, from substation to server rack. While competitors queue for interconnections, GIP would already own the substation.
That’s not diversification. That’s strategic dominance.
The Capital Flywheel Spins Up
The financial momentum behind Aligned is staggering. In January 2025, the company raised $12B from Macquarie and institutional investors to accelerate its 5 GW buildout. Abu Dhabi’s MGX is also stepping in, with the potential to deploy tens of billions more.
This signals a new model: Wall Street and sovereign capital treating compute as a core asset class, not a niche tech play.
With roughly $1B in revenue, a $40B valuation implies ~40x revenue multiples a bold bet that AI demand will stretch traditional metrics.
The Geopolitical Angle
Data centers have shifted from local utilities to geostrategic infrastructure. Governments now view compute capacity as a matter of national competitiveness, shaping export bans, energy diplomacy, and industrial policy.
Through its ODATA subsidiary, Aligned has established deep roots in Brazil, Chile, and Mexico regions with lower build costs and more flexible regulatory environments. For BlackRock, this isn’t just about dominating the U.S. market. It’s about building hemispheric AI corridors under American capital leadership.
Aligned’s ODATA subsidiary has anchored its presence in Brazil, Chile, and Mexico mirroring the dynamics explored in Is ODATA’s $1.02B Green Deal Turning Latin America Into the Next AI Data Center Hub?
A New Valuation Logic
Every technological wave brings its own metrics. The dot-com boom revolved around “eyeballs.” The cloud era was about recurring revenue. The AI era is measured by “future utility secured.”
BlackRock isn’t paying for today’s margins. It’s buying time to power the ability to deliver multi-gigawatt capacity ahead of the grid. The $40 billion price tag reflects a strategy similar to oil majors locking up the best reserves before demand peaks.
The Skeptic’s Take
Not everyone is convinced. Valuations near 40x revenue echo late-stage venture froth more than traditional infrastructure norms. Energy volatility could derail timelines and economics. Regulators may bristle at one entity controlling both generation and consumption. And future AI efficiency gains could slow the demand curve.
Yet unlike speculative software, this is steel, concrete, and substations assets that endure beyond hype cycles.
The Takeaway
Look past the transaction and a clear pattern emerges. The world’s largest asset manager is quietly assembling a continent-scale AI infrastructure platform, integrating electrons and exaflops under one financial roof.
If successful, BlackRock’s power-first strategy would not just reshape data center finance it would anchor the United States at the heart of the global AI infrastructure map.