BlackRock and Nvidia’s $40 billion data-center deal values power sites 160% above public bitcoin miners

An investor group including BlackRock, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Elon Musk’s xAI has agreed to buy Aligned Data Centers from Macquarie Asset Management in a transaction valued at $40 billion, according to a Wednesday Bloomberg report.

The deal comes as demand for data-center capacity surges alongside artificial-intelligence development. Aligned, which builds and operates large campuses for cloud and enterprise clients, oversees about 50 sites across the Americas with more than 5 gigawatts of operating and planned capacity. The company will remain headquartered in Dallas, Texas and led by CEO Andrew Schaap, with the sale expected to close in the first half of 2026 pending regulatory approvals.

The buyers form part of the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership, a consortium launched last year by BlackRock and MGX to pour 10s of billions of dollars into AI-compute projects.

For crypto investors, the acquisition highlights how traditional capital is crowding into the same energy-dense infrastructure once dominated by bitcoin miners.

VanEck’s head of digital-asset research, Matthew Sigel, wrote on X that the $40 billion price tag “implies a valuation of roughly $8 million per megawatt” of capacity — far above the roughly $3 million per MW typical for publicly-listed mining powerhouses such as Iris Energy (ticker IREN), Riot Platforms (RIOT), Cipher Mining (CIFR), and Hut 8 (HUT).

“If miners can access project finance, that’s 150%–500% equity upside,” Sigel said .

That now-realized differential — about 160% higher on a per-megawatt basis — highlights the growing convergence between AI data center infrastructure and bitcoin mining.

Several firms, including Galaxy Digital, Bitfarms , and Canaan , are already repurposing mining assets and data-center space for high-performance computing.