BlackRock-led consortium buys Plano's Aligned Data Centers for $40 billion
A BlackRock-led consortium paid $40 billion for Plano-based Aligned Data Centers, putting its 2800 Summit Ave campus at the center of Texas' AI buildout.
BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners agreed to buy Plano-based Aligned Data Centers for $40 billion, putting one of Collin County’s biggest private tech employers at the center of the AI infrastructure race. The deal is expected to close in 2026, and the buyers also committed another $5 billion to support Aligned’s expansion.
For Plano, the clearest local marker is already on the map at 2800 Summit Ave, where Aligned’s campus was built in 2015 and is fully operational. The company has about 250 employees in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, a footprint that makes the headquarters more than a mailbox in Collin County and ties the city directly to the national scramble for data-center capacity.
Aligned’s reach extends far beyond Plano. The company operates or is developing about 50 data center campuses across the United States and Latin America, and the new owners are betting that demand for AI compute will keep growing fast enough to justify even more construction. That is why the acquisition also lands as a land-and-infrastructure story, not just a finance deal: the consortium is buying a platform built to absorb power, equipment and real estate at scale.
The transaction comes after a January 2025 capital raise of more than $12 billion, a sign that the business had already become extremely capital-intensive before BlackRock stepped in. It also follows a larger push by BlackRock, GIP, Microsoft and MGX, who launched the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership in 2024 and said the vehicle could mobilize up to $100 billion for AI-related infrastructure, including data centers and supporting power systems.
In North Texas, Aligned has already planted stakes beyond its Plano headquarters. The company has a planned campus in Mansfield and a $700 million data center project in Plano with Lambda, adding to the local land use and utility demands that tend to follow these projects. As Wall Street and Big Tech race to secure sites and power for AI buildouts, Collin County is no longer just hosting office space and suburban growth. It is becoming part of the infrastructure that makes the next wave of computing possible.
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