Nvidia, Microsoft, xAI and BlackRock part of $40 billion deal for Aligned Data Centers (www.cnbc.com)

A consortium led by MGX and BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners, together with members of the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership (AIP) — a group formed last year by BlackRock, MGX, Microsoft and Nvidia and now joined by the Kuwait Investment Authority, xAI and Temasek — has agreed to buy Aligned Data Centers from Macquarie Asset Management for $40 billion. The transaction, described as the largest global data‑center deal to date, marks AIP’s first acquisition and a step toward its goal of deploying $30 billion of equity capital. The deal is expected to close late next year, subject to regulatory approvals. For the AI/ML community this accelerates access to large-scale compute real estate: Aligned operates 50 campuses across North and South America with more than 5 gigawatts of operational and planned capacity — enough power to host large fleets of GPU/accelerator racks used for model training and inference. The involvement of Microsoft and Nvidia in AIP signals strategic alignment between cloud, chip and infrastructure investors, potentially prioritizing AI workloads, streamlining procurement of accelerators and negotiating long‑term power and cooling solutions. In short, the acquisition simultaneously consolidates data‑center supply, unlocks capital for rapid expansion of AI‑grade capacity, and could shape where and how future large model training occurs.