The Seller Wanted $30 Billion For Its Asian Data Centers And May Get $25

On September 24, 2026, Bloomberg reported that a consortium backed by BlackRock and IFM Investors had entered exclusive talks to acquire Stack Infrastructure's Asia Pacific data centers, in a deal that could value the portfolio at up to $25 billion. Reuters relayed the report and said it could not immediately verify it.

The buyers are not a typical private equity pair. The group includes the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership, a vehicle founded by BlackRock, its Global Infrastructure Partners arm, MGX, Microsoft, and Nvidia, alongside the Australian infrastructure investor IFM.

The assets are the physical layer of Asian cloud computing. Stack, owned by Blue Owl Capital, operates data centers in Tokyo, Osaka, Sydney, Melbourne, and Johor Bahru.

The price movement is the detail worth noting. Bloomberg reported in May that Blue Owl was exploring a sale of the Asia operations at a valuation above $30 billion. Five months later, analysts put the likely range at $20 billion to $25 billion, and the consortium is still only beginning due diligence.

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The Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership launched in late 2024 with plans to invest more than $30 billion in AI-related infrastructure, and its investor list runs from Nvidia and Microsoft to the Kuwait Investment Authority and Temasek.

That composition is unusual. A chipmaker and a cloud provider are co-investors in a fund buying the buildings where their own products will be installed and their own services sold, which blurs the line between supplier, customer, and landlord.

The logic comes straight from BlackRock's own argument. The firm has told shareholders that a single AI data center can cost $40 billion to $50 billion, that even the largest technology companies are not equipped to finance construction at that scale, and that they would rather focus on technology than on owning infrastructure.

A seller asking above $30 billion and a buyer working toward $20 billion to $25 billion is price discovery in public. It suggests buyers are being disciplined about assets that have been treated as automatically scarce.

For Blue Owl, the sale converts a development position into cash. Owners who built and leased these facilities are selling to long-horizon investors, which is the normal rotation of infrastructure from builders to income funds.

The buyers want yield, not growth. Pension money and sovereign funds are purchasing leased, cash-generating buildings rather than betting on AI demand directly, which makes the rental contracts underneath more important than any technology forecast.

Nothing is agreed. The consortium is preparing due diligence, deliberations are ongoing, and Bloomberg noted the talks could be prolonged or fail to produce a transaction. None of the parties commented.

The price gap also invites more than one reading. It may reflect buyer discipline, or simply that the original $30 billion figure was an opening position, and due diligence can move the number in either direction. These assets carry the same exposures discussed across the sector: power availability, lease renewal risk, and tenant concentration among a handful of hyperscalers. A fund whose investors include the vendors selling into those same facilities also raises questions about how independently such assets get valued.

The talks matter because they put a negotiated price on AI infrastructure at a moment when most valuations are still set by enthusiasm. The real impact depends on where the number lands, and whether a visible discount marks the start of broader repricing or just one seller's ambitious opening ask.

Disclosure: This content is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or recommendations. You should always conduct your own research or consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.