Data center fever hits a new high as the race to define the future of enterprise AI continues to heat up.
Macquarie Asset Management has agreed to sell Aligned Data Centers to a consortium led by BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners, along with the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), MGX, Microsoft, and Nvidia, in a deal valued at $40 billion.
“This transaction underscores Macquarie Asset Management’s ability to consistently identify key thematics early and find opportunities that create value for our clients and partners,” said Ben Way, head of Macquarie Asset Management, in a statement announcing the deal. “The scaling of Aligned Data Centers from two locations to 50 in seven years is representative of our approach to working with great companies and teams to support their rapid growth and deliver positive impact.”
Aligned, which initially consisted of two facilities, has evolved into a portfolio encompassing 50 data center campuses across five countries under Macquarie’s seven-year stewardship. The company now boasts more than 5 gigawatts of operational and planned capacity across the US, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia.
This latest deal — following Macquarie’s 2024 sale of AirTrunk to another consortium — is expected to close in the first half of 2026, pending regulatory approvals and customary conditions.
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Investing in AI’s backbone
Despite fears of an AI boom going bust, the financial logic behind the acquisition points to the long-term monetization of physical AI infrastructure. Just this week, during its AI World conference, Oracle’s Co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison hyped up the company’s sprawling 1,000-acre data center campus in Abilene, Texas, calling it a “1.2-billion-watt AI brain.”
Oracle’s campus hosts more than 450,000 Nvidia GB200 GPUs and represents a significant investment in enterprise and industrial AI infrastructure. By joining forces on Aligned, Nvidia and Microsoft are further embedding themselves into the physical layer of the AI ecosystem. This deal shifts both companies from buyers of infrastructure to co-owners of the supply chain that underpins their future bets on AI.
The consortium plans to deploy up to $30 billion in equity, with the capacity to expand to $100 billion, including debt, according to Reuters.
Moving to the next AI level
The Aligned acquisition underscores how AI infrastructure has become the center of gravity for the tech industry’s next growth cycle, where capital is consolidating around hyperscale campuses capable of delivering continuous power, cooling, and compute capacity at industrial scale. The sector’s biggest players are aligning financial and technological resources to secure that base.
The result is a clear shift from speculative AI investments toward physical assets that determine real capacity, including land, energy, and grid access. AI’s future growth is now being shaped by infrastructure availability as much as model and chip innovation.
Data centers are all the rage these days: In September, OpenAI announced its building of five more data centers in the US as part of the Stargate project.