A consortium led by BlackRock and Abu Dhabi sovereign fund MGX closed its $40 billion acquisition of Dallas-based Aligned Data Centers on Tuesday, then immediately committed an additional $5 billion in growth capital. The transaction is the largest private datacenter deal on record and gives the consortium control of 32 operational facilities across nine U.S. markets, totaling roughly 1.5 gigawatts of critical IT capacity. Aligned operates hyperscale campuses purpose-built for AI training and cloud inference workloads, with anchor tenants including Microsoft, Oracle, and an undisclosed Magnificent Seven customer widely understood to be Meta.
The deal values Aligned at approximately 26 times trailing EBITDA, a 40 percent premium to the sector median, reflecting the scarcity of tier-one powered shell inventory in power-constrained markets. BlackRock Infrastructure Partners sourced the equity alongside MGX and a co-investor group that includes Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and GIC. The consortium assumed roughly $8 billion in existing project finance debt, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley arranging a new $12 billion credit facility at SOFR plus 225 basis points. The $5 billion growth commitment will fund four campuses under construction in Phoenix, Northern Virginia, and Dallas, scheduled to deliver between Q3 2025 and Q1 2027. Combined, those projects add 600 megawatts of capacity, all pre-leased under fifteen-year triple-net agreements with minimum annual escalators of 3 percent.
This marks the second time BlackRock has bought and scaled a datacenter platform in the past eighteen months. The firm acquired AirTrunk for $24 billion in October, consolidating Asia-Pacific hyperscale assets, and now controls the two largest private datacenter operators outside Equinix. The timing reflects a structural shift in infrastructure allocation: hyperscalers are signing capacity forward at rates that treat power as the binding constraint, not construction cost. Northern Virginia, the world's densest datacenter market, is effectively sold out through 2027, and Phoenix faces grid capacity limits that have pushed some developers to explore nuclear co-location agreements. MGX, launched in March 2024 with a $100 billion mandate focused on AI and semiconductor infrastructure, has now deployed roughly $65 billion across three transactions, including stakes in Anthropic and a joint venture with Microsoft for Middle Eastern GPU clusters.
Operators should watch whether BlackRock begins consolidating smaller regional platforms under Aligned's operational backbone, particularly in secondary markets like Atlanta and Chicago where land and power remain available but require scale to attract anchor tenants. The $5 billion growth envelope suggests the consortium expects to sign at least two additional hyperscale leases in the next six months, likely with Google or Amazon, both of which are expanding U.S. training footprints. MGX's involvement also signals continued Gulf sovereign interest in owning the physical layer beneath Western AI buildout, a dynamic that has quietly reshaped datacenter cap rates and underwriting standards. Debt markets are pricing datacenter project finance inside industrial logistics for the first time, with lenders treating pre-leased hyperscale deals as quasi-sovereign risk.
The first Aligned expansion project, a 180-megawatt campus in Goodyear, Arizona, is scheduled to energize in September, with foundation work already complete and switchgear on order.