BlackRock has injected another 300 billion.

Just now, a new trillion-dollar unicorn has been born. Renowned data cloud service provider Databricks officially announced the completion of its second financing round within six months. After this round, Databricks' total cumulative financing scale since its establishment will reach an unprecedented $30 billion (approximately RMB 2030 billion), and its overall valuation will also hit an unprecedented $188 billion (approximately RMB 1274 billion), making it the world's 4th highest-valued unlisted company after Anthropic, OpenAI, and ByteDance.

However, this milestone moment did not "cause a stir in the venture capital circle." A large number of tech media outlets reposted the news but did not engage in further discussions. As for the reason, I believe you are well aware:

Everyone's numb.

More than three years have passed since the GPT era began. People have long understood that no matter how AI represents the future, it must follow the simple rule of "build roads first if you want to get rich." To deliver a sufficiently good AI experience, it is necessary to provide abundant energy and data centers of sufficient scale. Under this premise, it is not exaggerated for the valuation of an enterprise like Databricks to rise to any level, and there will most likely be a second and third Databricks in the future.

Lo and behold, at the very moment Databricks became a new trillion-dollar unicorn, the world's most expensive data center was also born.

Recently, AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), an artificial intelligence infrastructure investment alliance under BlackRock, officially acquired Aligned Data Centers, a data center under Macquarie Bank, for a total price of $40 billion (approximately RMB 2700 billion).

At the same time, AIP will form a consortium together with MGX (the AI investment fund jointly established by Microsoft and the United Arab Emirates) and GIP (Global Infrastructure Partners, an infrastructure investment institution) to add $5 billion for subsequent expansion. The total investment scale of Aligned Data Centers has thus been pushed up to $45 billion (approximately RMB 3050 billion).

The Most Powerful Buyer

In fact, compared to the newly named "most expensive data center in history" Aligned Data Centers, this time's buyers AIP, GIP, and MGX are more worth introducing.

The embryonic form of AIP first appeared in September 2024, but it was initially called "Global Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Investment Partnership (GAIIP)", co-initiated by BlackRock and GIP, with a plan to focus on investing in the construction of data centers and energy projects. Its initial fundraising target was $300 billion (approximately RMB 2030 billion), and the long-term goal is to expand the total size of the fund to $1000 billion (approximately RMB 6776 billion) through debt financing — this long-term target figure is large enough to make GAIIP one of the largest investment vehicles in Wall Street history.

Among the two initiators, BlackRock is a household name and needs no introduction. In comparison, the other initiator GIP is "much more low-key." Founded in 2006, GIP is one of the largest investment institutions in the global infrastructure sector. Its investment themes cover transportation, energy, digitalization, sewage and waste treatment, etc. To date, it has an asset management scale of over $1000 billion, and the size of its latest flagship fund launched in 2019 exceeds $220 billion. In addition to equity investment, it also has a credit strategy business, with more than 300 portfolio companies across over 100 countries.

And MGX, co-founded by Microsoft and UAE royal figures, is the fund manager (GP) selected by GAIIP.

MGX was established on January 22, 2024. In addition to artificial intelligence industrial infrastructure, its other two main investment tracks are semiconductors (including logic and memory chip design and manufacturing) and artificial intelligence core technologies and applications (including AI models, software, data, life sciences, and robotics). Its board chairman is Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan — whose other title is the Deputy Ruler of Abu Dhabi.

In addition, according to GAIIP's original vision, NVIDIA will join the entire plan as an "investment advisor" to provide "full-ecosystem" support for GAIIP, such as providing expertise in building AI data centers and AI factories. At the same time, GAIIP also hopes that NVIDIA, as an "industry leader," can participate in the construction of high-quality AI supply chains and energy procurement chains, thereby driving the entire portfolio to benefit.

In short, if all these plans are implemented smoothly, GAIIP will not only become the largest investment fund on Wall Street, but also the most influential investment fund in the artificial intelligence industry, arguably without a peer.

After all, the AI industry's pick-and-shovel seller (NVIDIA), the investor of top AI companies (Microsoft), and the "gas station" for AI giants (BlackRock) are all involved in it.

In the original official press release, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink spoke highly of this ambitious plan. He stated in the official release:

"Mobilizing the capital markets to build AI infrastructure such as data centers and power will unlock trillions of dollars in long-term investment opportunities... These investments will help drive economic growth, create jobs, and fuel AI technological innovation."

Of course, all these plans have indeed been implemented smoothly. In March 2025, NVIDIA officially joined the plan and was directly upgraded from an "investment advisor" to an investor.

New investors that joined in the same period also included Elon Musk's xAI. In addition, GE Vernova, the core energy business under General Electric, and NextEra Energy, the largest wind and solar power company in the United States, became supply chain partners in the plan.

In June 2025, the Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA) and Temasek also became new investors. Ravi Lambah, Head of Strategic Plans at Temasek, said they are very optimistic about the plan, noting that this cooperation "reflects our focus on major future changes and trends, and that artificial intelligence has the potential to become the most transformative and impactful technology across all industries and enterprises."

However, there were also some minor hiccups along the way. For example, in October 2024, BlackRock announced the acquisition of GIP for $12.5 billion, making GIP a wholly-owned subsidiary operating independently under BlackRock. The entire GAIIP plan thus became a project independently initiated by BlackRock — and perhaps precisely because GIP became a subsidiary, its independent brand was no longer important. In March 2025, the GAIIP plan was officially renamed AIP, and eventually became what we see today as the "AI Infrastructure Partnership", the most powerful buyer in the artificial intelligence industry.

The Unassuming "Most Expensive in History"

If AIP is the well-deserved "most powerful buyer" in the history of artificial intelligence, then the title of "most expensive data center in history" for Aligned Data Centers is somewhat of a "forced elevation".

In October 2025, AIP officially announced the plan to acquire Aligned Data Centers, stating that it had reached an agreement with Macquarie Bank, the then owner of the assets, for a total transaction price of $40 billion, pending regulatory approval. Logically, this should have been good news, as it was AIP's (including its predecessor GAIIP) first outbound investment since its establishment. It can be fully understood as a huge amount of capital officially pouring into the artificial intelligence industry, which is exciting to even think about.

But the problem is that the Aligned Data Centers project cannot withstand close scrutiny.

At that time, Aligned Data Centers' total capacity was only claimed to be "5GW", while the actual operational capacity was slightly over 600MW, and the capacity under construction was only about 700MW.

For horizontal comparison, in 2025, third-party research firm datacenterHawk released a set of statistics on the "operational + under-construction capacity" of the world's major data center operators (excluding China) as of Q4 2024. Among them, the first-tier players Digital Realty, QTS, and NTT all had a total capacity of over 2GW. Aligned Data Centers' total 1.3GW capacity (operational + under construction) firmly places it in the second tier.

For vertical comparison, the contrast is even starker. Just over a month before this acquisition plan was announced, in August 2025, Vantage Data Centers, one of the world's largest data center operators, just announced that it would build a new 1.4GW data center in Texas with a total investment of $25 billion.

Going back further, in September 2024, Blackstone and Canadian pension funds acquired AirTrunk, the largest data center in the Asia-Pacific region, at a valuation of $16 billion, while AirTrunk's total operational capacity at that time exceeded 800MW.

In short, the AIP acquisition of Aligned Data Centers at that time not only failed to become good news, but also heightened people's anxiety, because a close look would reveal a clear premium in the entire transaction. Bloomberg also did the math at the time, using the price standard of $210/kW/month counted by CBRE, one of the largest commercial real estate services and investment management firms in the United States, to roughly calculate that the annual revenue corresponding to Aligned's already launched capacity is about $1.6 billion. If the under-construction projects are included, Aligned's revenue can reach approximately $3.4 billion.

Bloomberg described the transaction at the time as "acquiring a little-known data center", pointing out that the valuation logic of AI infrastructure has changed — investors are starting to pre-price the "computing power capacity that can be built in the future", noting that "a large amount of production capacity and the corresponding revenue currently only exist in the future".

This is also the reason why the hype around the Aligned acquisition was slightly higher than that of Databricks' trillion-dollar valuation: people always thought "it can't be that much of an overdraw on the future, right?"

Fortunately, despite everyone's skepticism, the project itself has delivered results.

When the acquisition plan was announced in October 2025, BlackRock's official statement said Aligned had 50 campuses with 5GW+ "operational and planned capacity". By the time the deal was officially closed in July, Aligned's data had grown to 51 campuses with 6.4GW+ "operational and planned capacity", including a 264MW facility completed in Maryland in March 2026 and a 540MW project started in Texas in April.

In addition, latest reports show that Meta has agreed to lease part of the capacity of a Pennsylvania project that Aligned is developing.

(Data center distribution map published on Aligned's official website)

It can be said that although the Aligned acquisition had a significant premium, it has indeed gradually delivered on the original expectations. The only remaining suspense now is whether the $5 billion additional investment is due to BlackRock and Microsoft seeing positive feedback, or a "gap-filling" measure because the project construction progress is severely behind schedule?

Andrew Schaap, CEO of Aligned, is very optimistic on his personal social media, saying: "This milestone reflects the skills of our outstanding team and the strength of the platform we have built — it is also one of the largest private investments ever made in the digital infrastructure space... At this time, the market demand for our business has reached an unprecedented level."

In my opinion, this question really needs to be answered by time. If a year from now Aligned is still promoting "7GW+ planned capacity" but its actual operational capacity is still only 700 or 800MW, then we can say with relative certainty that:

The capital market seems to have over-discounted the future.

This article is from the WeChat official account "36Chong", written by Pu Fan, and published with authorization from 36Kr.