BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners and Abu Dhabi's MGX have closed the acquisition of Aligned Data Centers for $40 billion enterprise value, marking one of the largest infrastructure deals in the AI buildout cycle.
The consortium, which also includes the AI Infrastructure Partnership, now controls 51 data center campuses with a combined 6.4 gigawatts of capacity. The closing occurred on July 21. The deal was first announced in October 2025 but represents a distinct milestone now that capital has moved and assets have transferred.
Aligned Data Centers operates facilities purpose-built for large language model training and inference workloads, with power availability the core constraint in the market. The 6.4 gigawatt footprint places the consortium among the largest operators of AI-grade infrastructure globally. OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI have each stated that power availability, not compute or capital, is the limiting factor in scaling frontier model training.
BlackRock's GIP manages roughly $100 billion in assets and has shifted capital aggressively into power infrastructure and data center assets over the past 18 months. Abu Dhabi's MGX, the state's sovereign investment fund for AI and advanced technology, has deployed capital into semiconductor manufacturing, GPU supply chains, and now data center infrastructure as part of a broader hedge against U.S. supply concentration. The AI Infrastructure Partnership was formed specifically to acquire and operate compute facilities at scale.
Filecoin, the decentralized storage network, posted the acquisition notice on X. Filecoin's network operates as decentralized storage where capacity contributors retain economic ownership, distinct from centralized data centers operated by institutional consortiums.
The $40 billion enterprise value for 51 campuses and 6.4 gigawatts works to approximately $6.25 billion per gigawatt of capacity, a figure investors and operators will benchmark against future deals as the AI infrastructure market hardens.
What moves now is whether additional sovereign wealth funds and asset managers follow this deal model, acquiring large-scale, operational data center portfolios rather than building from greenfield sites. If institutional capital continues to consolidate AI infrastructure through acquisition rather than construction, power pricing and grid access become strategic assets held by a narrower set of capital holders.
