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BlackRock, Nvidia, and Microsoft lead $40 billion deal for AI data center giant Aligned

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A powerful investor group including BlackRock, Microsoft, and Nvidia has agreed to buy Aligned Data Centers, one of the world’s largest data center operators, in a $40 billion deal aimed at securing critical infrastructure for artificial intelligence development.

The acquisition from Macquarie Asset Management marks the first major investment by the AI Infrastructure Partnership, a consortium that also includes Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund and Elon Musk’s startup xAI. The group plans to deploy up to $100 billion in capital, combining equity and debt, to expand global AI infrastructure.

“With this investment in Aligned Data Centers, we further our goal of delivering the infrastructure necessary to power the future of AI,” said Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock and chairman of the partnership.

The move underscores the massive surge in spending by tech giants on computing capacity. Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and CoreWeave are collectively expected to spend around $400 billion on AI infrastructure this year, according to Morgan Stanley. Meanwhile, OpenAI has inked multibillion-dollar deals with Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom to secure chip and data capacity worth over $1 trillion.

Founded in 2013, Aligned operates more than 80 data centers across 50 campuses in the U.S. and Latin America, with over 5 gigawatts of operational and planned capacity. The company has been a key beneficiary of the AI infrastructure boom, raising $12 billion in capital earlier this year.

Aligned will remain headquartered in Dallas, Texas, under CEO Andrew Schaap. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2026.

Core Scientific urges shareholders to approve $9 billion CoreWeave merger

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Core Scientific’s board has called on shareholders to vote in favor of its proposed $9 billion all-stock sale to CoreWeave, saying the merger would deliver long-term growth and risk reduction benefits for the crypto miner.

In an investor presentation released Wednesday, the board said it had “unanimously determined” that the deal represented the best outcome for all shareholders. The merger, announced in July, values Core Scientific at $20.40 per share and would combine its energy-intensive mining infrastructure with CoreWeave’s AI-focused data center network.

The deal promises significant cost savings, operational synergies, and improved access to capital, according to the company. CoreWeave, a fast-growing cloud provider powered by Nvidia AI chips, would integrate Core Scientific’s facilities to support large-scale AI model training — an increasingly valuable use case as demand for compute power surges.

However, the proposal faces pushback from Two Seas Capital, Core Scientific’s largest shareholder with a 6.3% stake, which said it plans to vote against the deal, arguing it “materially undervalues” the company and poses “substantial economic risk” to investors.

Core Scientific said the transaction would help it diversify beyond cryptocurrency mining and strengthen its position in the fast-growing AI infrastructure market.

Meta partners with Arm to boost AI recommendations across Facebook and Instagram

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Meta Platforms announced a new partnership with chip technology firm Arm Holdings to power the AI systems behind its personalization and recommendation engines across Facebook and Instagram. The collaboration marks another milestone for Arm as it pushes deeper into data center and AI computing — areas long dominated by Intel and AMD’s x86 architecture.

Meta will deploy Arm-based data center platforms to run the ranking and recommendation algorithms that determine what users see on its apps. Both companies said the shift will deliver higher performance and improved energy efficiency compared to traditional x86 systems.

Arm, backed by Japan’s SoftBank, provides the chip designs that serve as blueprints for central processing units (CPUs) used in billions of devices worldwide. While its technology already dominates smartphones, it is rapidly expanding into server and personal computer markets.

As part of the announcement, Meta revealed a $1.5 billion investment in a new Texas data center, its 29th facility globally, to support AI infrastructure growth. The two companies also said they have optimized Meta’s AI software for Arm chips and made the improvements open source, allowing developers to freely use and build upon them — a move expected to speed up Arm’s adoption in cloud computing.

Meta and Arm plan to continue refining their joint open-source projects to make AI workloads more efficient and accessible across the industry.