BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager, has executed another significant strategic move in the rapidly expanding artificial intelligence infrastructure sector, announcing an agreement to establish a €2 billion joint venture partnership with ACS, a major Spanish construction and development company. This collaboration represents the latest development in the global competition to own and control the critical physical infrastructure—the data centers, power systems, and facilities—that underpin the ongoing AI revolution.
The partnership structure involves BlackRock committing substantial capital in phases, beginning with an initial investment of approximately €1 billion, with the remaining funds to be deployed based on achieving specific project commercialization milestones. This phased approach provides flexibility while aligning payments with actual progress and de-risking the investment to some degree. The venture has been designed to scale around ACS’s extensive pipeline of data center developments, which currently totals approximately 1.7 gigawatts of capacity—a substantial portfolio that reflects the enormous power requirements of modern AI computing infrastructure.
ACS’s Growing Data Center Portfolio and Capabilities
ACS has been positioning itself aggressively in the data center development space, with the company reporting remarkable growth in this business segment. During 2024, ACS disclosed that its data center project orders had surged by 138 percent compared to the previous year, reflecting the explosive demand from technology companies, cloud providers, and AI firms seeking to expand their computing capacity. This growth has been powered significantly by Turner Construction, ACS’s United States subsidiary that holds the distinction of being the largest construction firm in the country by various measures.
Turner’s existing project portfolio demonstrates the scale and quality of clients ACS is serving in the data center sector. The subsidiary is currently constructing major data center facilities for Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) in Indiana and for CoreWeave, a fast-growing AI infrastructure company, in Pennsylvania. These high-profile projects with leading technology companies validate ACS’s capabilities in the specialized and technically demanding field of data center construction, where requirements for power density, cooling systems, redundancy, and network connectivity far exceed those of conventional commercial construction.
Beyond Turner’s activities in the United States, other ACS subsidiaries are advancing data center projects across additional geographic regions, reflecting the company’s global footprint and ability to execute complex infrastructure developments across different regulatory environments and markets. The initial assets being contributed to the new joint venture with BlackRock span multiple continents, including properties and projects in Europe, the United States, and Australia, providing geographic diversification that reduces regional concentration risk.
Looking ahead, ACS is evaluating an even more substantial pipeline of potential developments. The company has disclosed that it is currently reviewing additional data center sites across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. According to company statements, ACS has built more than 5.5 gigawatts of data center capacity to date and is now evaluating over 11 gigawatts of potential future developments across these three major geographic markets. This pipeline, if fully realized, would represent more than a doubling of the company’s cumulative data center development experience and would position the BlackRock-ACS joint venture as one of the largest dedicated data center development platforms globally.
Deal Structure and Financial Implications
The financial structure of the partnership provides interesting insights into how both parties are approaching risk allocation and value creation. BlackRock, operating through its Global Infrastructure Partners unit, will hold a 50 percent stake in the venture, with ACS retaining the other 50 percent ownership. This equal partnership structure suggests both parties view themselves as bringing complementary and roughly equivalent value—BlackRock contributing capital, asset management expertise, and relationships with institutional investors seeking infrastructure exposure, while ACS brings development expertise, construction capabilities through Turner and other subsidiaries, and an established pipeline of projects.
For ACS, the transaction generates immediate financial benefits beyond just the capital partnership. The Spanish company expects to record a capital gain of approximately €100 million from the deal, likely reflecting the difference between ACS’s book value in the assets being contributed and the valuation implied by the joint venture structure. This gain provides ACS with immediate earnings accretion while maintaining 50 percent ownership and ongoing participation in future value creation from the developments.
The phased payment structure includes several components designed to align incentives and manage risk. Beyond the initial €1 billion commitment, BlackRock has agreed to provide an additional variable payment of up to €1 billion that will be linked to specific project commercialization milestones. This structure means that as projects progress from development through construction to operational status with paying tenants, additional capital becomes available. This milestone-based approach protects BlackRock from overcommitting capital to projects that might face delays or difficulties, while providing ACS with clear pathways to accessing the full capital commitment as it successfully advances developments.
Additionally, the agreement includes a potential contingent payment of €200 million that could be triggered by new projects currently under review but not yet part of the initial portfolio. This optionality allows the partnership to expand beyond its initial scope if attractive opportunities emerge from ACS’s broader pipeline.
While the announced equity commitment totals €2 billion, some industry reports suggest the broader partnership, when including both equity and debt financing leveraged against the data center assets, could eventually represent total capital commitments approaching €23 billion. This much larger figure would reflect the typical capital structure for large-scale infrastructure projects, where equity represents a smaller portion of total capitalization, with the remainder funded through various debt instruments secured by the assets and their revenue-generating lease contracts.
BlackRock’s Broader AI Infrastructure Strategy
This ACS partnership arrives just weeks after BlackRock led a consortium in completing a $40 billion acquisition of Aligned Data Centers, one of the largest transactions in the data center sector’s history. These back-to-back major commitments to data center infrastructure underscore BlackRock’s conviction that the AI revolution will require massive investment in physical computing infrastructure and that owning these assets will generate attractive risk-adjusted returns for the firm’s clients.
BlackRock’s accelerated activity in AI infrastructure follows the September 2024 launch of a broader strategic initiative in partnership with MGX (an investment vehicle associated with the United Arab Emirates), Microsoft Corporation, and Nvidia Corporation. This multi-party collaboration was specifically designed to accelerate investment in AI infrastructure, recognizing that the pace of AI model development and deployment was beginning to outstrip the availability of suitable data center capacity to support training and inference workloads.
The structure of this broader initiative reflects recognition that different parties bring complementary capabilities: Microsoft and Nvidia understand the technical requirements and future roadmap for AI computing infrastructure from their positions as leading software and hardware providers, MGX brings substantial capital from sovereign sources, and BlackRock contributes investment management expertise, additional capital mobilization capabilities through its various funds and client relationships, and infrastructure asset management experience accumulated over decades.
The Broader Context: Global Infrastructure Race for AI Computing
BlackRock’s moves with both ACS and Aligned Data Centers represent participation in what has become a global competition to own and control the infrastructure layer supporting artificial intelligence development and deployment. Investors have been directing capital aggressively toward any assets or companies that touch AI training and inference computing capacity. This includes obvious beneficiaries like semiconductor manufacturers Nvidia and SK Hynix, which produce the specialized processors used in AI systems, as well as leading AI research and product companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
However, attention has increasingly shifted to the infrastructure developers and operators that provide the physical facilities housing this computing equipment. Hyperscale data centers designed for AI workloads have significantly different characteristics than traditional data centers built for conventional enterprise IT applications or web hosting. AI computing generates far higher power density, requiring more robust electrical infrastructure and more sophisticated cooling systems. Network requirements differ as well, with AI training often requiring extremely high bandwidth and low latency connections between computing nodes.
The demand trajectory for this specialized infrastructure appears steep. Major technology companies are competing to build and train increasingly large AI models, while simultaneously working to deploy AI capabilities across their product portfolios and to enterprise customers. Cloud infrastructure providers are racing to offer AI computing capacity to customers who lack the capital or expertise to build their own facilities. This confluence of factors has created a supply-demand imbalance where suitable data center capacity, particularly facilities with access to reliable, affordable electrical power, has become a constraining factor on AI development.
Strategic Significance for ACS Leadership
For ACS chairman Florentino Pérez, who simultaneously serves as president of Real Madrid football club and is the construction firm’s largest individual shareholder, the BlackRock partnership represents another step in a broader strategic repositioning of ACS toward higher-margin businesses tied to digital infrastructure and the AI economy. Traditional construction, while representing ACS’s historical core business and a source of stable revenue, typically operates on relatively thin profit margins given intense competition and the commoditized nature of many construction services.
Data center development and operation, by contrast, can generate significantly higher margins given the specialized expertise required, the mission-critical nature of the facilities for clients (making them less price-sensitive), and the potential for ongoing operational revenue from facilities that ACS might retain ownership stakes in rather than simply building on a fee basis for others. By partnering with BlackRock’s capital and institutional investor relationships, ACS can retain ownership participation in valuable assets it develops while accessing the substantial capital required to fund these power-intensive, technologically sophisticated facilities.
Investment Implications and Market Context
The scale of capital flowing into data center infrastructure reflects investor conviction that AI represents a genuine platform shift in computing rather than a temporary hype cycle. The willingness of institutional investors, represented by BlackRock’s various funds and client mandates, to commit billions to these long-duration infrastructure assets suggests confidence in sustained demand growth for AI computing capacity over the 10-20 year timeframes typical for infrastructure investments.
However, the investments also carry risks that sophisticated parties like BlackRock are certainly evaluating. Technology evolution could potentially reduce the computing intensity required for certain AI applications through algorithmic improvements or more efficient chip designs. Regulatory developments around AI, data privacy, or energy consumption could affect demand. Economic downturns could pressure technology companies’ capital expenditure budgets. Geographic concentration of projects creates exposure to regional power grid constraints, permitting challenges, or policy changes.
The partnership structure itself, with milestone-based capital deployment and contingent payments tied to project success, demonstrates how experienced infrastructure investors structure deals to manage these uncertainties while positioning to capture upside if the AI infrastructure buildout accelerates further.
Conclusion: Positioning for the AI Infrastructure Boom
BlackRock’s €2 billion commitment to the ACS joint venture, following closely on the $40 billion Aligned Data Centers acquisition, signals the asset manager’s conviction that AI infrastructure represents one of the most compelling infrastructure investment opportunities of the coming decade. By partnering with ACS’s development and construction expertise, particularly through Turner’s capabilities and relationships in the United States market, BlackRock is positioning to participate not just in acquiring existing facilities but in developing the next generation of AI-optimized data centers across multiple global markets.
For ACS, the partnership provides substantial capital to accelerate its growing data center pipeline while generating immediate value recognition through the €100 million capital gain, all while retaining 50 percent ownership and ongoing participation in a business segment that offers better margins than traditional construction services. As both parties move forward with the initial portfolio while evaluating the substantial pipeline of potential additional projects, the venture could become one of the largest dedicated AI infrastructure development platforms globally, reflecting the extraordinary capital requirements of the ongoing AI revolution.
Acknowledgment: This article was written with the help of AI, which also assisted in research, drafting, editing, and formatting this current version.
