The investment giant’s new Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership has agreed its first deal, snapping up Aligned Data Centers from Macquarie Asset Management for about $20 billion. Counting debt, the transaction is said to be worth a staggering $40 billion, making it one of the largest data centre takeovers ever.

Joining BlackRock in the buyer group are Mubadala Investment’s MGX and BlackRock’s own Global Infrastructure Partners. The sale, expected to wrap up in the first half of 2026 pending regulatory approval, signals just how feverish the AI infrastructure boom has become.

Dallas-based Aligned is one of the fastest-growing hyperscale operators in the Americas, catering to the cloud and AI crowd. It runs or is building roughly 50 campuses across the region, with five gigawatts of operational and planned capacity. This is enough power to light up a small country or one large GPU cluster.

BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink said: “With this investment in Aligned Data Centers, we further our goal of delivering the infrastructure necessary to power the future of AI, while offering our clients attractive opportunities to participate in its growth,”

This deal marks the first outing for the consortium founded by BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners, MGX, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The group aims to raise as much as $100 billion in equity and debt to bankroll AI infrastructure under the banner of “shaping AI-driven economic growth.”

Macquarie first ploughed cash into Aligned in 2018 and doubled down two years later. Under its stewardship, the company ballooned from two data centre sites into a continent-spanning platform. Now, with AI greed in full swing, the Australians are cashing out just as the Americans and Gulf investors pile in.