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BlackRock$BLK · filed: grew revenue 18.7% in FY2025 to $24.2BNew shipNext year $24.2B–$29.8B sealedCheck ▾Close ▴
What BlackRock filed
Grew revenue 18.7% in FY2025 to $24.2 billion, operating margin 29.1% against a 24.4% median for security brokers, dealers & flotation companies, equity 32.9% of assets, and dividend per share up 3 years running. Every figure links to the filing it came from on BlackRock’s card. New ship: no warning signs.
What the house said in advance
Revenue for the fiscal year after 2025-12-31 between $24.2B and $29.8B, an 80% range sealed on 26 Sept 2026 · receipt #592edd · graded in public by the revenue in BlackRock’s next annual report.
Figures as filed with the SEC. Ranges, scores and boats are statistical descriptions of past filings, not ratings or recommendations. Reporting, not advice.
In plain words
**$45B** total consortium capital repositions AI data infrastructure from REIT financing to sovereign-private hybrids with strategic intelligence overlays.
$40 billion
acquisition of Aligned Data Centers on Tuesday and immediately…
$5 billion
in growth capital
16
facilities across
450 megawatts
of critical IT load in the trailing twelve months
BlackRock and Abu Dhabi sovereign fund MGX closed the $40 billion acquisition of Aligned Data Centers on Tuesday and immediately committed an additional $5 billion in growth capital. The Dallas-based operator now sits inside a consortium structure that merges the world's largest asset manager with Gulf petrodollar allocation, creating the single largest private owner of AI-forward data center capacity in North America.
Aligned operates 16 facilities across 10 U.S. markets, anchored by hyperscale clients including Microsoft, Oracle, and Meta. The company added 450 megawatts of critical IT load in the trailing twelve months, nearly double the expansion rate of Digital Realty and Equinix combined during the same window. Aligned's sale-leaseback model — building to spec for anchor tenants on long-term power purchase agreements — made it the preferred counterparty for AI training clusters that require 100-plus megawatt single-tenant deployments. BlackRock's Infrastructure Partners fund led the buyer consortium. MGX, launched in March 2024 with a $100 billion mandate, contributed an undisclosed but material equity portion.
The $5 billion growth commitment signals immediate construction starts, not portfolio optimization. Aligned's pipeline includes 12 announced projects totaling 1.2 gigawatts of additional capacity, concentrated in Phoenix, Northern Virginia, and Utah markets where power availability and interconnect density support the next wave of GPU-dense workloads. The consortium structure solves the capital mismatch that plagued public data center REITs: Aligned can now tap MGX's sovereign balance sheet for land and transformers while BlackRock syndicates lease streams to its insurance and pension LPs. This is infrastructure as asset-liability matching, not growth equity.
The deal removes the last major independent U.S. hyperscaler from the market and establishes a template other sovereign funds will study. MGX is not a passive allocator — it took board seats and operational governance rights, according to filings reviewed by Markets Edge. Abu Dhabi wants exposure to AI compute, but it also wants data on power consumption, cooling efficiency, and GPU utilization across North American facilities. That information flows back to ADNOC, Mubadala, and the broader UAE industrial complex, which is building its own AI infrastructure in parallel. BlackRock provides the institutional wrapper and the LP distribution. MGX provides the permanent capital and the strategic optionality.
Watch for lease renewals and extension announcements from Aligned's anchor tenants over the next 90 days. Microsoft holds 28% of Aligned's contracted capacity by megawatt-hour, with 60% of those contracts reaching renewal windows in 2025 and 2026. If extensions come with expanded capacity commitments, the $5 billion growth capital deploys faster than the 18-month construction cycle implies. Also watch MGX's next move in the consortium playbook — the fund has flagged data centers, semiconductors, and life sciences as priority verticals, and it prefers co-investment structures with U.S. managers who need sovereign scale.
BlackRock now controls more North American data center capacity than any manager outside the hyperscalers themselves, and it did so without touching the public REIT complex. The message is structural: AI compute is too strategic and too capital-intensive to live inside dividend-yielding vehicles. It lives where power, land, and patient capital converge.
Branded by POPS4 · proof in 60 seconds
For the principal
Track MGX's co-investment appetite in U.S. hard infrastructure — sovereign capital with operational governance creates asymmetric information flows your competitors lack.
For the operator
Model Aligned's anchor tenant concentration risk into any Digital Realty or Equinix comp — Microsoft renewal terms will reprice the entire hyperscale leasing stack.
For the house
Flag client exposure to public data center REITs — this consortium model compresses cap rates and shifts the best assets off public markets permanently.
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