BlackRock’s $40B data center deal opens a new infrastructure battle for CIOs

A consortium led by private equity firm BlackRock is buying Aligned Data Centers for $40 billion. It’s said to be the largest data center deal in history — but more than that, it highlights a market shift that’s putting enterprise CIOs at a strategic disadvantage when it comes to accessing AI infrastructure.

As private equity and tech giants consolidate ownership of data center capacity, they’re not removing it from the market, but they are fundamentally changing who gets first access, for how much, and on what terms. For enterprise IT leaders, that means competing for capacity after hyperscalers have locked up what they need, often years before it’s even built.

“Capital has become the gatekeeper of compute, deciding who gets capacity, where, and at what price,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research. “When ownership changes hands, contracts and pricing often change with it.”

The consortium acquiring Aligned consists of BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), the United Arab Emirates investment fund MGX, and the AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), which brings together BlackRock’s GIP and MGX (again), Microsoft, and Nvidia, among other investors. It will control more than 5 gigawatts of data center capacity across 50 campuses in the US and Latin America. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals, the consortium said in a statement.

Control equals pricing power

Private equity firms have accounted for 80-90% of total data center merger and acquisition activity since 2022, according to a report by Americans for Financial Reform. Transaction values reached $73 billion in 2024, up from $26 billion in 2023, according to Synergy Research Group.

That consolidation has concentrated capacity in fewer hands, reducing competition and giving operators greater pricing power.

Everest Group partner Yugal Joshi said, “CIOs are under significant pressure to clearly define their data center strategy beyond traditional one-off leases. Given most of the capacity is built and delivered by fewer players, CIOs need to prepare for a higher-price market with limited negotiation power.”

The numbers bear this out. Global data center costs rose to $217.30 per kilowatt per month in the first quarter of 2025, with major markets seeing increases of 17-18% year-over-year, according to CBRE. Those prices are at levels last seen in 2011-2012, and analysts expect them to remain elevated.

Gogia said, “The combination of AI demand, energy scarcity, and environmental regulation has permanently rewritten the economics of running workloads. Prices that once looked extraordinary have now become baseline.”

Hyperscalers get first dibs

The consolidation problem is compounded by the way capacity is being allocated. North America’s data center vacancy rate fell to 1.6% in the first half of 2025, with Northern Virginia posting just 0.76%, according to CBRE Research. More troubling for enterprises: 74.3% of capacity currently under construction is already preleased, primarily to cloud and AI providers.

“The global compute market is no longer governed by open supply and demand,” Gogia said. “It is increasingly shaped by pre-emptive control. Hyperscalers and AI majors are reserving capacity years in advance, often before the first trench for power is dug. This has quietly created a two-tier world: one in which large players guarantee their future and everyone else competes for what remains.”

That dynamic forces enterprises into longer planning cycles. “CIOs must forecast their infrastructure requirements with the same precision they apply to financial budgets and talent pipelines,” Gogia said. “The planning horizon must stretch to three or even five years.”

The situation is further complicated by operators rebranding traditional facilities as AI-ready without fundamental infrastructure changes. “Many are rechristening traditional data centers into AI data centers to exploit the rapidly growing demand,” Joshi said. “This is further constraining the industry.”

New strategies for a constrained market

Analysts said enterprise IT leaders need to adopt new strategies to navigate the constrained market. Joshi recommends expanding beyond tier-1 data centers to secondary markets and working to secure capacity commitments with service-level agreements around availability, right of first offer, and right of first refusal. “Working with more data center and cloud vendors will help them diversify the risk to an extent,” he said.

Power availability has emerged as a critical factor too. AI workloads require rack densities of 130 kilowatts currently, with projections reaching 250 kilowatts, according to JLL—far beyond the 40 kilowatts of traditional computing.

CIOs should also examine existing workloads, Joshi said. “A significant amount of data center capacity is wasted on idle workloads because of poor architecture, underutilized adoption, and suboptimal management. If CIOs can modernize these workloads it can materially reduce the need for raw capacity that their data centers are now unable to meet.”

Data center decision-making needs to happen at the top, said Gogia. “Infrastructure can no longer sit at the periphery of AI planning; it must sit at the centre of boardroom strategy,” he said. “The enterprises that control their compute environment will shape their own AI destiny. Those that rely on residual access will find that intelligence, like power, always flows to where it is guaranteed first.”

This article originally appeared on CIO.com.