Exclusive talks, a $25 billion price tag, and 1.4 gigawatts of Asia-Pacific compute — the largest AI-infrastructure trade on record, with the seller walking away with roughly a 78% return.
The world's biggest asset manager wants to own the wires. Not the AI models, not the chips — the buildings the chips live in.
A consortium backed by BlackRock and IFM Investors is in exclusive talks to buy Stack Infrastructure's Asia-Pacific data-center portfolio for up to $25 billion from Blue Owl Capital. Bloomberg News reported the talks on 24 September 2026; Reuters, careful as ever, could not independently verify them. Talks, in deal-speak, are what fail right before they succeed.
What is for sale: 11 to 14 data centers across Tokyo, Osaka, Sydney, Melbourne and Johor Bahru, with 1.2 to 1.4 gigawatts of IT capacity. Other coverage counts Singapore and Seoul among the markets too. The precise map matters less than what it is: the physical ground floor of the hyperscalers' Asia expansion — the rooms where AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud actually live.
The buyers are the interesting part. BlackRock's AI Infrastructure Partnership — AIP, a roughly $100 billion commitment pool launched in late 2024 specifically to own AI compute infrastructure — has Nvidia, xAI, Microsoft and MGX among its investors. Technology's giants, in other words, are paying the landlord alongside the landlord. Next to it sits IFM Investors, the Australian infrastructure house with about $202 billion under management. BlackRock itself is roughly a $15 trillion operation. This is not a speculative bid. It is the furniture of the financial system arriving.
And the seller's arithmetic is the deal's quiet headline. Blue Owl Capital assembled this portfolio in 2021–2023 at a blended cost of about $14 billion — back when data centers were considered, in the industry's own phrase, boring boxes. Selling at $25 billion crystallises a return of roughly 78% in under four years. The boring boxes turned out to be anything but.
One outlet reports the deal is already closed, with BlackRock taking 60% via its Global Infrastructure Partners arm and IFM 40%. Others say talks. The split may matter less than the direction: the capital is moving toward power, and it is not being subtle about it.
The deal's economics explain the confidence. Roughly 92% of the portfolio sits under 12-year take-or-pay leases with hyperscalers — take-or-pay meaning the tenant pays whether it uses the capacity or not, which is to say, the revenue is closer to a government bond than a rental contract. Rents escalate about 3.8% a year, and power costs pass through to the tenant. Forward EBITDA near $1.1 billion implies an entry multiple of roughly 23 times — expensive by old infrastructure standards, entirely normal where scarcity rules.
The buyers aren't buying buildings. They're buying 1.4 gigawatts of permission to exist in the AI century.
Scarcity is the whole story, and it has two parents. The first is demand: AI's appetite for compute has turned Asian power grids and data halls into the scarcest asset class on earth. You cannot train a frontier model in a rented corner of someone else's server; you need dedicated, cooled, grid-connected floor space, and there is not enough of it. The second is regulation: sovereign data-residency mandates — governments requiring their citizens' data to stay on national soil — add a regulatory premium to every megawatt. A data center in Johor Bahru is not just a building; it is a building that certain data is legally allowed to be inside.
There is a price clue in the history. Bloomberg reported in May that Stack weighed selling its Asia operations at over $30 billion. The $25 billion now discussed is the negotiated middle — the seller came down, the buyers came up, and both sides left convinced. When a $5 billion haircut still leaves a 78% return, nobody is weeping.
The deeper pattern is worth naming. This is the same financialisation wave that turned wind farms, toll roads and fiber into "infrastructure" — now arriving at the one infrastructure the 2020s actually run on. The pension fund that once bought a motorway now buys a server hall. The yield looks similar. The tenant, this time, is the cloud.
Western coverage — Reuters/Bloomberg via SRN News — reads this as a capital-allocation story: BlackRock's AIP deploying its $100 billion war chest, the GIP machinery in action, the 60/40 split as evidence of how seriously the largest pool of capital in the world takes compute. The verification caveat — talks may fail — gets the headline treatment.
In this telling, the 23x multiple is the analytical hinge: expensive, but explainable, because 12-year take-or-pay leases at 92% occupancy are closer to sovereign credit than to commercial property. The story is about finance discovering that AI's bottleneck is not talent or capital — it is a power socket.
Eastern coverage — CaproAsia out of Hong Kong, Markets Edge — reads this as a geography story. The map is the message: Tokyo, Osaka, Sydney, Melbourne, Johor Bahru. The $202 billion Australian manager, the $15 trillion American one, and the Asian ground underneath them. In this telling, the deal is Asia's grid being re-priced by someone else's demand curve.
The read from Hong Kong is pointed on the 78%: Blue Owl bought the "boring boxes" in 2021–2023 and sold the scarcest asset class on earth in 2026. The lesson drawn is not about data centers at all — it is about how fast a commodity becomes a chokepoint when the world's models all want the same floor space.
Global South coverage — the Economic Times' infrastructure desk — reads the lease economics and sees who is not in the room. Twelve-year take-or-pay contracts with the three American hyperscalers: in this telling, the deal is a map of digital dependency, priced at 23x EBITDA.
The read from Delhi is structural: the world's data increasingly lives in buildings owned by New York and Sydney, rented by Seattle and Mountain View, and cooled with Asian electricity. The sovereign data-residency mandates are the response — every government now wants its data on its own soil — and this $25 billion is, among other things, the market pricing that anxiety.
