A group of investors, led by BlackRock-Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), and with the participation of Nvidia and Microsoft, have reached an agreement to acquire Aligned Data Centers, until now owned by Macquarie Asset Management, in an operation that values the company at 40,000 million dollars (more than 34,400 million euros), including debt.
In this way, BlackRock-GIP and its partners have executed a multi-million dollar bet at a time of emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) by facing the largest transaction in history in the field of data centers.
Aligned, headquartered in Texas and with operations in the US and South America, has 50 campuses and 78 data centers under management or in future development. Locations include Northern Virginia, Chicago, Dallas, Ohio, Phoenix and Salt Lake City in the US; and Sao Paulo (Brazil), Querétaro (Mexico), and Santiago de Chile, in Latin America. In January, the company raised more than $12 billion in equity and debt commitments from investors, including funds managed by Macquarie Asset Management, which joined the company in 2018.
The partners expect the agreement to close in the first half of next year. The consortium, called the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership, also includes the Kuwait Investment Authority, Temasek Holdings of Singapore and xAI, Elon Musk’s start-up. Likewise, Cisco is a technological partner of the consortium, which has GE Vernova and NextEra Energy as partners industrialists, responsible for activities such as the management and expansion of energy solutions for AI data centers.
The consortium’s initial objective is to make an investment of 30,000 million dollars in social capital, with a potential to reach 100,000 million, including debt.
The operation comes at a time of euphoria in the field of AI, with multi-million dollar operations carried out by technological giants. Among them, the alliance between Nvidia and OpenAI stands out, which will include an investment of 100,000 million dollars, or the agreements between the start-up by Sam Altman with AMD and Broadcom.
In turn, Nvidia, in addition to the aforementioned investment in OpenAI, has participated in nearly a hundred financing rounds in AI companies over the last three years, including xAI, Thinking Machines Lab, Scale AI, and Perplexity, among others. With this push, the AI chip giant has become the company with the largest market capitalization in the world, over $4.5 trillion.
BlackRock’s move reinforces the manager’s interest in this sector, which acquired GIP last year for $12.5 billion. GIP already owned US-based data center company CyrusOne along with KKR. Both investment firms acquired CyrusOne in an operation that closed in 2022 and valued it at approximately $15 billion.
“AIP is positioned to meet the growing demand for the infrastructure needed as AI continues to transform the global economy,” said Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock.
In this sense, assets linked to digital infrastructures have become one of the most attractive segments for investors, given their strong forecasts, linked to the growth of artificial intelligence. The American technology giants alone plan to invest more than $400 billion in these infrastructures this year.
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