Aligned’s $40bn moment: Inside the deal powering AI’s infrastructure supercycle

On stage with Capacity’s senior reporter Amber Jackson, Anubhav Raj, chief investment officer at Aligned Data Centers, offered a candid look at the transaction that has reshaped the digital infrastructure landscape.

In October 2025, Aligned announced its acquisition by AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP) – a joint venture between MGX and Global Infrastructure Partners, itself part of BlackRock. The deal, backed by some of the most influential investors in AI infrastructure, marked a decisive shift in the scale and ambition of private capital flowing into compute.

For Raj, the moment was years in the making.

“Right now, our footprint spans approximately 50 campuses across 15 markets and seven countries,” he said. When he joined nearly a decade ago, Aligned had “one data centre in Dallas and two megawatts leased in that data centre”.

Backed by Macquarie Infrastructure over the past eight to nine years, the company scaled rapidly. But as Raj and the leadership team looked to the next chapter, questions emerged about whether to pursue a public listing or seek a different path.

The crux was capital structure, as Macquarie’s investment sat within a closed-ended fund. As Aligned doubled down on hyperscale campus expansion from 2021 onwards, Raj and his colleagues began to consider the limits of traditional exit routes. “As you got to a certain scale, you really needed to have open-ended capital,” he explained.

A public listing was actively explored. Raj, who has IPO experience, noted that if you are heading to public markets, “you never start early enough in terms of telling your story”. Discussions with investors took place through 2024, with a potential listing in 2026 or 2027 on the table.

But the launch of AIP in September 2024 changed the equation. Described by Raj as the largest open-ended private vehicle raised with a focus on AI and its underlying infrastructure, it presented an alternative aligned with Aligned’s long-term ambitions.

By the first half of 2025, there was what Raj called “a lot of mutual alignment” around the opportunity set, particularly in the Americas for large-scale data centres. Price agreement followed in Q3.

The headline shift is not strategy, but scale. “The only thing that changes is the amount of capital we’ll be looking to deploy,” Raj said. Internally, the team talks about having put “a little jet fuel into our ambitions”.

Speed to market remains the industry’s defining tension. AI workloads are surging, yet large-scale infrastructure cannot be delivered overnight. “People would love to have a data centre built tomorrow,” Raj acknowledged. “The reality is this is a large-scale infrastructure project.”

The advantage, he argued, lies in forward planning. Powered land, “it’s really a power bank, it’s not a land bank”, and speculative investment in long-lead equipment are central. Aligned has standardised elements of its supply chain, ordering components without knowing whether they will land in Phoenix, Northern Virginia or Dallas, but confident they will be deployed across its portfolio. Recent orders extend into 2027 and 2028 deliveries.

Such moves are designed to anticipate what Raj sees as an unprecedented expansion. Large campuses that once measured 20–30MW grew to 200–300MW. Now gigawatt-scale developments are emerging. Within years, he suggested, even those could look modest.

Inevitably, comparisons to the dotcom boom surface. Raj’s response drew a ripple of recognition in the room. “It’s 100% like the 90s, except you’re in the wrong century,” he said. “It’s not the 1990s, it’s the 1890s”, likening today’s build-out to the infrastructure surge preceding the first industrial revolution.

Raj cited estimates that North America today has roughly 30GW of operational data centre capacity. Over the next decade, he suggested, that figure could reach 200GW, or, in more bullish scenarios, far higher. Even the lower end implies trillions in required investment.

Sustainability, he insisted, remains core to Aligned’s DNA. The company continues to pursue carbon-free energy in the US, supported by renewables, power purchase agreements and renewable energy credits, while acknowledging that natural gas may play a bridging, or potentially longer-term, role as grids decarbonise.

Yet amid the financial engineering and megawatt arithmetic, Raj returned repeatedly to culture. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” he said. As Aligned grows from more than 1,000 employees today to potentially three to five times that in five years, intentionality will be critical to preserving what he described as a “hungry, humble heart”.

Metro Connect 2026: Greg Williams’ six trends reshaping data centres, fibre and towers