By Adria Calatayud
BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners and Spanish construction company ACS said they agreed to form a joint venture to develop data centers, with an initial portfolio valued at about 2 billion euros ($2.33 billion).
The deal marks GIP's latest push into infrastructure needed to support artificial intelligence, an area the infrastructure investor has been focusing on lately.
Upon closing of the transaction, the 50-50 joint venture will consist of ACS's existing data-center portfolio, with assets under development across Europe, the U.S. and Australia with total capacity of 1.7 gigawatts valued at 2 billion euros, the companies said Friday.
ACS is contributing its existing portfolio to the business in exchange for about 1 billion euros in cash and initial earnout payments of up to 1 billion euros subject to achieving commercial milestones, the companies said. An additional payment of up to 200 million euros might be earned from additional projects under review, they added.
The Spanish company said it is looking at a pipeline of potential projects exceeding 11 GW across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
Data centers continue to attract billions of dollars in funding as companies seek more power to satisfy growing demand for AI services. Earlier this week, Microsoft and Alphabet's Google said they would invest more than $16 billion to expand data centers and other infrastructure in Europe.
"Global demand for data centers is set to grow more than 15 times by 2035, driven by the expansion of AI, cloud migration, and the exponential rise in data volumes," ACS Chief Executive Juan Santamaria said.
The group said it expects to generate between 20 billion euros and 25 billion euros in revenue from its data-center business by 2030, with estimated earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization ranging from 1.2 billion euros to 1.3 billion euros and margins of 5% to 6%.
Write to Adria Calatayud at adria.calatayud@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
11-14-25 1213ET
