BlackRock-Backed Consortium Eyes Stack Infrastructure Data Centers

A consortium backed by BlackRock and IFM Investors has entered exclusive talks to buy Stack Infrastructure data centers in Asia Pacific, a deal that could value the portfolio at up to $25 billion, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The investor group, which includes the BlackRock-backed Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership (AIP) and IFM, is preparing to conduct due diligence on the Stack Infrastructure data centers and hopes to reach an agreement soon with Stack's owner, Blue Owl Capital, according to reporting by Reuters. Deliberations are ongoing, and the people said the talks could drag on or fall apart before any deal is signed.

If it closes, the transaction would rank among the largest data center deals ever in Asia Pacific, a region where global investors have been pouring money into digital infrastructure as demand for cloud computing, AI workloads, and digital services keeps climbing. Anthropic is even pairing autonomous AI agents with its own wet lab for biology research, as covered in a recent GenZ NewZ report.

A long sale process reaches its sharpest phase

Bloomberg reported in May that Stack was considering its options, including a sale of its Asia operations, and in June that IFM and AIP were among the potential bidders. Blue Owl had initially sought a higher valuation for the assets, according to people familiar with the matter cited in those reports.

Denver-based Stack operates data centers in key Asia Pacific markets including Tokyo, Osaka, Sydney, and Melbourne, according to its website. The portfolio of Stack Infrastructure data centers would give a buyer an immediate foothold in four of the region's tightest data center markets, where land, power, and permits for new builds are hard to secure.

Exclusivity still falls short of a signed deal. What it does give the consortium is a window to examine the assets without competing bidders in the room, a standard step before final offers. Communications Today also reported the talks, putting the potential valuation in the same range while cautioning that deliberations are ongoing and could still fall apart. Reuters noted it could not independently verify the report, and BlackRock, IFM Investors, Stack Infrastructure, and AIP did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Why the buyer group is built this way

AIP launched in late 2024 with plans to invest tens of billions in AI-related projects, making it one of the world's largest investment vehicles focused on data centers and the energy facilities needed to power AI applications. Its investors include Nvidia, xAI, Microsoft, and investment firm MGX. The push reflects how central AI infrastructure has become to big tech's capital spending, and to the policy debate around what autonomous AI systems should be allowed to do, as explored in GenZ NewZ's report on an OpenAI agent that broke into Australia's Medicare portal.

The pairing with IFM Investors fits the asset class. IFM has long experience with regulated, utility-like assets, and data centers generate the kind of steady, contract-based cash flows infrastructure investors are built for. They also require heavy upfront spending on power and cooling, which suits investors with deep balance sheets and long horizons.

This is not AIP's first move. Its first deal was a major acquisition of Aligned Data Centers, announced last October, which established the partnership as an aggressive buyer in the space. A Stack deal would give it a Pacific Rim counterpart to its existing portfolio.

What a record price tag would do to the market

If the negotiations succeed, the headline valuation for the Stack Infrastructure data centers would become a reference point for every data center sale in the region. Bankers, buyers, and lenders use marquee transactions as comparables, shorthand for sanity-checking the price of similar assets. A serious negotiation at this level would let sellers anchor their expectations higher and push lenders to recalibrate the returns they demand to finance new projects.

The timing matches a broader rush. Global funds have been competing for exposure to Asia's data center sector, betting the region's AI adoption will keep outpacing the capacity available to run it. Hyperscale cloud providers and AI labs need the space now, not in the years it can take to permit and build a new facility in Tokyo or Sydney. Buying an existing, scaled portfolio skips that wait.

None of it is certain. Valuations this large leave little room for surprises found in due diligence, and data center portfolios carry concentration risk around a handful of large tenants. Other suitors could still emerge, according to the people cited in the reports, and exclusive talks have collapsed at this stage before.

If Blue Owl and the consortium land an agreement for the Stack Infrastructure data centers, it would count among the biggest infrastructure-style takeovers of the year, and confirm Asia Pacific as the most contested data center market on the map.