BlackRock may be nearing a $38B deal that would wisely capitalize on AI’s thirst for power (www.cnbc.com)

BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) is reportedly nearing a $38 billion bid to acquire utility AES, a deal that would be one of the largest infrastructure takeovers in history and strategically positions BlackRock to profit from rising power demand driven by generative AI. AES operates power plants and energy solutions used by major cloud and tech firms — including Amazon, Microsoft and Meta — as they build increasingly power-hungry data centers. The move follows BlackRock’s 2024 purchase of GIP and a broader push into private infrastructure, signalling a deliberate bet on energy and data-center-linked assets as core growth areas. For the AI/ML community, the implications are concrete: accelerated capital flows into generation, grid upgrades, and long-term offtake contracts to support GPU-heavy computing clusters. An AES acquisition could speed deployment of renewables, battery storage and flexible thermal capacity near data-center hubs, reduce energy risk for hyperscalers, and influence where new AI compute is sited (cost, latency and resilience considerations). It also highlights a market trend where asset managers are directly financing the physical infrastructure underpinning ML scale — from turbines and substations to on-site microgrids — a dynamic that will shape compute availability, cost curves and regional competition for AI buildout. The deal remains unconfirmed and could still fall through.