Microsoft, BlackRock Partner to Build $100B AI Data Centers, Powering the Future of Generative AI

A coalition of businesses, including Microsoft and BlackRock, is pooling up to $100 billion to build artificial intelligence data centres and the energy infrastructure to support them.

The businesses are part of the GAIIP, or Global Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Investment Partnership, which was revealed on Tuesday in a press release. The other players are the United Arab Emirates-based tech investor MGX and the infrastructure investor Global Infrastructure Partners, or GIP, which BlackRock is buying.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated, “We are committed to ensuring AI helps advance innovation and drives growth across every sector of the economy.” “Financial and industry leaders come together to build the infrastructure of the future and power it sustainably,” he said of the program.

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The organization hopes to raise $100 billion in the future, including through debt financing, in addition to its original capital objective of $30 billion.

Building data centres brimming with Nvidia GPUs—graphics processing units—that can power generative AI models, like the ones powering OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, has become a race among tech companies. The GPUs require a significant amount of power, and the surge in demand has caused a backlog in the establishment of new facilities.

In addition to the capital expenditures required to enable infrastructure expansion for its Azure public cloud, which serves OpenAI and other AI customers, Microsoft has also invested. Microsoft reported in July that its capital expenditures for the fiscal fourth quarter came to $19 billion, including the cost of assets acquired through finance leases.

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BlackRock declared in January that it would buy GIP for about 12 million shares of BlackRock common stock and $3 billion in cash. Last week, BlackRock announced that it anticipates the purchase to close on October 1.

With AI company G42 and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala as founding partners, MGX was introduced in March.