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A newly formed investment group made up of BlackRock, Nvidia, xAI, Microsoft and others will acquire Aligned Data Centers in a $40 billion deal, the companies said Wednesday. The move adds fuel to a growing land grab for infrastructure to support artificial intelligence development.
The consortium, called the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), plans to deploy $30 billion in equity capital to begin with, and could invest as much as $100 billion when debt is included. This is the group’s first transaction, and it signals how central data infrastructure has become to the next phase of AI development.
Aligned designs and operates data centers for clients including hyperscalers, enterprise firms and newer cloud providers. It controls 50 campuses across the U.S. and Latin America with more than 5 gigawatts of operating and planned capacity, including properties still under development.
The acquisition comes amid a scramble to secure the compute power needed for AI workloads. Last month, Nebius Group signed a five-year agreement to supply Microsoft with $17.4 billion worth of GPUs. Around the same time, CoreWeave reached a $6.3 billion deal with Nvidia to reserve its unused server space.
The Aligned deal is expected to close in the first half of 2026.
Shares of bitcoin mining firms, particularly those that have shfited business models to AI infrastructure, are continuing to post gains. In early trading. Hut 8 Corp (HUT), IREN (IREN), Bitfarms (BITF) and CleanSpark (CLSK) were ahead in the 3%-6% range.
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