A newly formed investment group made up of BlackRock, Nvidia, xAI, Microsoft and others will acquire Aligned Data Centers in a $40 billion deal, the companies said on Wednesday. The move adds fuel to the growing land grab for infrastructure to support AI development.
The consortium, called the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), plans to deploy $30 billion of capital initially, and could invest up to $100 billion when debt is included. This is the group’s first deal, and signals how centralized data infrastructure has evolved into the next stage of AI development.
Aligned designs and operates data centers for clients including hyperscalers, enterprise companies and newer cloud providers. It controls 50 campuses across the United States and Latin America with more than 5 GW of operational and planned capacity, including properties still under development.
The acquisition comes amid a scramble to secure the computing power needed for artificial intelligence workloads. Last month, Nebius Group signed a five-year agreement to supply $17.4 billion worth of graphics processing units to Microsoft. Around the same time, CoreWeave reached a $6.3 billion deal with Nvidia to reserve unused server space.
The Aligned transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2026.
Bitcoin mining stocks, especially those that have shifted business models to AI infrastructure, continue to see gains. In early trading. Hut 8 Corp (HUT), IREN (IREN), Bitfarms (BITF), and CleanSpark (CLSK) advanced in a 3%-6% range.
Source: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/10/15/bitcoin-miner-stocks-continue-surge-with-blackrock-nvidia-microsoft-joining-in-usd40b-ai-data-center-bet