A consortium led by private equity firm BlackRock announced that it will acquire Aligned Data Centers for $40 billion. This is considered the largest data center acquisition ever, but it is more than just size. In other words, it shows that the market is changing, making it increasingly difficult for corporate CIOs to secure AI infrastructure.
Data center capacity is not physically disappearing from the market, but private equity and big tech companies are rapidly consolidating ownership, fundamentally changing who gets priority access, for how much, and under what terms. From the perspective of corporate IT leaders, this means that major cloud companies are competing for the remaining resources after securing the necessary capacity years before data center construction.
“Capital is now the gateway to computing, determining who can secure capacity in which regions and at what cost,” said Sanchit Bir Goggia, principal analyst and CEO of Greyhound Research. “With each change in ownership, it is common for terms and pricing to change as well.”
