BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners, its AI Infrastructure Partnership vehicle and Abu Dhabi's MGX said on Tuesday they had closed the acquisition of Aligned Data Centres at a US$40 billion enterprise value — and committed another US$5 billion to expand it under surging AI demand. The consortium takes over 51 campuses across the Americas and a combined 6.4-gigawatt operational and planned footprint. For Abu Dhabi, this is the largest single deployment of a thesis that has been building for two years: own the physical layer of the AI economy.
The deal in short
The buyer is a three-party consortium. BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) leads. AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP) — the vehicle GIP, MGX and their partners set up to mobilise up to US$30 billion in equity and roughly US$100 billion including debt — invests alongside. MGX comes in as principal partner and takes co-control of one of the largest AI-focused data centre platforms in the Americas.
The seller is Macquarie Asset Management and its co-investors, who first announced the transaction on 14 October 2025. Enterprise value at close stands at US$40 billion. The consortium separately earmarked US$5 billion of fresh capital for expansion capex — the more consequential number for anyone tracking AI compute supply. Aligned's CEO Andrew Schaap and the existing management team remain in place. The company stays headquartered in Dallas.
Inside Aligned Data Centres
Aligned runs 51 campuses with 6.4 GW of operational and planned capacity — the scale that matters for large-model training and inference. Its US footprint centres on northern Virginia, Chicago, Dallas, Ohio, Phoenix and Salt Lake City. In Latin America it operates in São Paulo, Querétaro and Santiago.
The operational edge is a patented waterless liquid cooling system. That matters twice over: it removes water constraints from siting decisions, and it handles the thermal density today's AI accelerators demand. In a hyperscale market throttled by permits, power and water, both are meaningful.
MGX and the Abu Dhabi strategy
MGX was founded in 2024 as a private Abu Dhabi investment firm with a single mandate — AI and the infrastructure that supports it. Its shareholders, Mubadala Investment Company and the technology group G42, give it sovereign-scale patience and operational proximity to compute.
Its Fund I closed this month at US$49 billion, above the US$45 billion target. The track record behind that raise is short but visible. MGX co-led OpenAI's US$122 billion round at a US$852 billion valuation in March 2026. It backed Anthropic's Series G — US$30 billion at a US$380 billion post-money — in February 2026, and returned for the US$65 billion Series H at US$965 billion in May. Its US$2 billion cheque into Binance in March 2025 marked the first institutional investment of that size into the exchange.
Aligned adds the missing layer. MGX has now backed a foundation-model lab (OpenAI), a safety-first frontier lab (Anthropic), a settlement layer (Binance) and, as of Tuesday, the physical compute that feeds all of them.
What it means for UAE business
For readers in the UAE, three practical layers matter.
Reputational. Abu Dhabi is no longer just an LP writing cheques into US venture funds. It is now a co-owner of critical AI infrastructure inside the world's largest data-centre market. That reads through every subsequent conversation UAE investors have with Silicon Valley boards and hyperscaler procurement teams.
Market-side. AI-adjacent M&A and venture activity in the UAE tracks the country's ability to move capital at speed. A US$40 billion close, on top of the OpenAI and Anthropic marks, resets the reference point for smaller local rounds. For founders raising in Abu Dhabi or Dubai, the comparable set shifts upward.
Operational. Aligned's expansion capex will land in the Americas, but the strategic effect reaches back. UAE-based AI teams and enterprises now sit one cap-table layer closer to physical capacity when they need it. That is the real value of infrastructure ownership: preferential access, not headline returns.
Context: the UAE sovereign-AI architecture
Tuesday's close did not happen in isolation. On the same day, e& UAE and Core42 launched a sovereign AI compute platform inside the UAE — the domestic leg of an increasingly explicit two-part architecture. MGX, AIP and GIP hold the external exposure to global compute assets. Core42 and e& build the local sovereign layer that keeps critical workloads on UAE soil.
Two announcements in the same news cycle read less like coincidence and more like choreography. For the UAE business community, the message is direct: AI infrastructure — its ownership, its siting, its financing — is now a strategic asset class the country intends to be organised around.
Primary sources: The National; Business Wire consortium release, 14 October 2025.
