↑ Read the latest from the desks · fresh intelligence, published daily✦Quiet reading✦No ads, ever✦Ad-free articles read by humans today …↑✦Boards engagement today … people · … AI✦Corporate brand & media services✦Made in Virginia Beach since 1997✦
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
BlackRock and MGX now control **1.5 gigawatts** of U.S. hyperscale capacity and have **600 megawatts** under construction, all pre-leased through 2040.
$40 billion
acquisition of Dallas-based Aligned Data Centers on Tuesday
$5 billion
in growth capital
32
operational facilities across
1.5 gigawatts
of critical IT capacity
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.
Branded by POPS4 · proof in 60 seconds
For the principal
Track MGX co-investment opportunities in U.S. digital infrastructure; their mandate prioritizes physical AI layer exposure with sovereign-grade counterparties.
For the operator
Monitor secondary-market datacenter acquisitions in Atlanta and Chicago; BlackRock's playbook suggests platform roll-up with anchor tenant pre-commitments imminent.
For the house
Establish dialogue with Aligned's CFO on co-location capacity in Phoenix campus; client exposure to NVDA and hyperscaler capex benefits from proximity.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori heritage press through approved vendors · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.
