Crypto in the Driver’s Seat, AI at the Wheel

How the data center trade is being re-rated, and why the cycle is only starting

Hello,
I hope you had a very productive week! I’ve decided to change the format of our conversations. Instead of long deep dives stretching across many pages, we’ll move toward practice — straight to investment ideas.

Today we’re talking about data centers. We’re witnessing a real boom in companies like $IREN, $CIFR and others. The question is: can they keep rising after already gaining hundreds of percent since the start of the year? It’s always psychologically tough to buy into names that have multiplied right in front of your eyes.

Let’s start with some surprisingly good economic news. Usually investment bank executives love to spread doom and gloom — think Ray Dalio. But this time Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon sounded more optimistic. According to him, the US economy will accelerate into 2026 thanks to ongoing stimulus and tech spending.

Speaking to Bloomberg, he said the economy is “still in pretty good shape” despite tariffs and a weaker US job market. Solomon expects a “drawdown” in equity markets over the next 12 to 24 months, but we know corrections come and go.

The deal

Global Infrastructure Partners, now part of BlackRock, is in advanced talks to acquire Aligned Data Centers in a deal valued at around $40B, the largest private transaction ever in the data center space. Aligned, founded in 2013, is a pure colocation operator: it builds hyperscale-ready facilities, delivers power, cooling, and security, and then leases out megawatts of capacity to hyperscalers and enterprises. They do not own GPUs or run workloads themselves — they provide the infrastructure that makes everything else possible.

Aligned has a development pipeline of 5 GW across the US, Canada, and Latin America — comparable to the output of several nuclear plants. That scale matters because in this cycle megawatts have become the new currency. Every large language model, every GPU cluster, every AI training run depends on how much power can be delivered, cooled, and kept stable. Without those megawatts, chips are useless. The $40B price tag effectively sets the value of future capacity at about $8M per MW, showing that pipeline itself is now an asset class investors are willing to pay for in advance.

Source: Aligned

BlackRock’s involvement through GIP underscores the point: the largest asset manager in the world, with nearly $10T under management, is putting real capital into data centers as strategic infrastructure. That sets a benchmark for how institutional investors will treat the sector going forward and establishes megawatts as a priced, tradable foundation of the AI economy.