BlackRock's AI Fund Is Buying Asia's Data Centers at a Discount
The AIP and IFM consortium is in exclusive talks for Stack's Asia-Pacific portfolio at up to $25 billion, below the $30 billion-plus Blue Owl was once said to want.
A consortium backed by BlackRock and IFM Investors has entered exclusive talks to buy Stack Infrastructure's Asia-Pacific data center portfolio in a deal that could value the assets at $20 billion to $25 billion, Bloomberg News reported on September 24. The buyers are the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership, the BlackRock-backed vehicle known as AIP, alongside Australian pension-fund manager IFM. The seller is Blue Owl Capital, which owns Denver-based Stack.
If it closes, this would be AIP's second megadeal in a little over two months, and the clearest sign yet that the capital pool assembled around Microsoft, Nvidia and Abu Dhabi's MGX is moving from buying American capacity to buying the rest of the world's.
What is on the table
Stack's Asia-Pacific footprint covers Tokyo, Osaka, Sydney, Melbourne and Johor Bahru in Malaysia. Per figures reported by Global Business Outlook, capacity ranges from 36 megawatts in Tokyo to 432 megawatts across two Melbourne sites, with 360 MW in Sydney, 216 MW in Johor Bahru and 78 MW in Osaka. By Flux's math, that adds up to roughly 1.1 gigawatts, though the reports do not break out how much of it is built versus planned.
The consortium is now in due diligence, and the reports stress that the price could move and that talks could still collapse. BlackRock, IFM, Stack and AIP did not immediately comment, according to the Reuters write-up of Bloomberg's story.
The price came down
The number is the story. When Bloomberg first reported in May that Stack was exploring options for its Asia business, the portfolio was pegged at more than $30 billion. By June, per Bloomberg and The Edge Malaysia, AIP, Brookfield, KKR, IFM and DigitalBridge were all circling. Three months later, the exclusive bidder is talking about $20 billion to $25 billion.
That gap does not necessarily mean the assets are worth less. Opening valuations in a sale process are marketing, and a portfolio in which much of the capacity is still planned rather than energized is hard to price. But it does say something about bargaining power. Even in the most capital-hungry stretch the data center sector has seen, a seller could not hold a headline price once the field narrowed to one exclusive bidder, and the buyer with the deepest pockets is the one that got exclusivity.
Who AIP is now
AIP launched in 2024 with BlackRock, its Global Infrastructure Partners unit, Microsoft and MGX as founders, initially targeting $30 billion of equity that could be scaled to as much as $100 billion with debt, according to Global Business Outlook. Nvidia and xAI have since joined, along with the Kuwait Investment Authority and Temasek, per that report.
Its first completed deal set the scale. On July 21, AIP, MGX and GIP closed the acquisition of Aligned Data Centers from Macquarie Asset Management funds at roughly $40 billion in enterprise value, according to the companies' announcement. Aligned brought 51 campuses and more than 6.4 GW of operational and planned capacity, and the buyers committed another $5 billion in growth capital.
Add Stack's Asia-Pacific sites and AIP would control, by Flux's math, something in the range of 7.5 GW of built and planned capacity across two continents, bought for roughly $60 billion to $65 billion. That is a single investment partnership, co-owned by the largest GPU vendor and one of the largest GPU buyers, sitting on a meaningful share of the non-hyperscaler capacity that AI labs and neoclouds rent.
Why Asia, why now
The markets in Stack's portfolio are not random. Tokyo and Osaka serve a Japanese market where domestic sovereign-AI programs and US hyperscalers are both expanding. Sydney and Melbourne have become the default Asia-Pacific region for workloads that need a stable legal environment. Johor Bahru has emerged as the overflow valve for Singapore, which has rationed new data center power for years, and the Malaysian side of the strait has absorbed much of that demand.
Owning powered land in those places is the scarce asset. Chips can be bought, if expensively; grid connections, permits and cooling water take years. That is why infrastructure funds with long-dated capital, like IFM, are pairing with strategic money like AIP. The pension capital wants contracted, utility-like returns from hyperscale leases; the strategic investors want to make sure there is somewhere to plug in the accelerators they build and buy.
What to watch
Three things will tell us whether this is a good trade or a top-of-cycle one. First, the final price and how much of the 1.1 GW is already leased to investment-grade tenants. Second, whether regulators in Japan, Australia and Malaysia take an interest in a vehicle with Nvidia, Microsoft and Gulf sovereign money as partners buying critical digital infrastructure. The reports already flag that the deal could be altered or terminated before signing. Third, whether Blue Owl, which has been one of the most active financiers of US AI campuses, is recycling capital out of Asia to double down at home.
For now, the signal is simple. The money that built the GPU boom is buying the buildings too, and it is doing so at prices it set.