U.S. Data Center Builders Race to Sell Stakes in Deals Worth Tens of Billions
Claire Weston
Several U.S. data-center developers plan to sell majority stakes this summer in deals totaling tens of billions of dollars, mostly to private-equity buyers — soaring construction costs are forcing operators to find deeper-pocketed partners, but whether enough buyers can absorb this many mega-deals at once remains the market's biggest open question.
Who is selling — and how much?
The sellers include Netrality Data Centers, DataBank, Edged, and EdgeCore Digital Infrastructure, with assets across Phoenix, Atlanta, and other markets.
The largest potential deal is Dallas-based DataBank, whose majority stake could be valued at up to $25 billion. It is currently held by a consortium led by DigitalBridge, alongside Swiss Life, EDF Invest, and AustralianSuper.
Denver-based EdgeCore, owned by Swiss PE firm Partners Group and focused on hyperscale cloud clients, asked potential buyers to submit bids last week.
Why are they all selling now?
The core pressure is cost. Shortages of electricians, pipefitters, and other skilled trades — plus tight supply of gas turbines and memory chips — keep pushing construction bills higher.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently estimated that building 1 gigawatt of compute on Nvidia architecture could soon cost $80–100 billion. This means → the capital threshold for a single project has risen so high that most operators can no longer go it alone.
In plain terms = building a data center increasingly resembles building a high-speed rail line — the bottleneck is not technology but cash and labor. Whoever has more money on hand keeps expanding.
What big deals have already happened?
Data-center M&A in 2025 has reached roughly $50 billion, more than double the prior year, per S&P Global Market Intelligence.
The record deal: a BlackRock-GIP and MGX consortium agreed to acquire Aligned Data Centers for about $40 billion — expected to close within weeks.
Blackstone took a roughly 49% stake in Rowan Digital Infrastructure in April and paid about $16 billion for AirTrunk in 2024. This reflects a broader pattern: top alternative-asset managers now treat data centers as core infrastructure allocations worth fighting over.
Who is buying — and are there enough buyers?
KKR's newly formed Helix Digital Infrastructure is reportedly evaluating these assets; other firms are also in the mix.
But Ravi Purohit, co-head of infrastructure at law firm Paul Weiss, is blunt: "There aren't that many people who can write that check."
This means → interest is broad, but the pool of institutions that can actually deploy billions in cash is thin. Whether buyer capacity can match a summer wave of simultaneous mega-deals is the biggest uncertainty.
Beyond money, what other risks loom?
Community pushback is rising. Residents worried about higher electricity bills, noise, and AI-related concerns have forced some developers to pause or abandon projects.
On the pricing side, certainty of power supply has become a key valuation variable — sites with secured power command premiums; those without get discounted.
Buyers may also tie portions of payment to construction milestones to hedge against cost overruns and delays. In plain terms = it is not pay-all-upfront, but "you build to step X, I pay to step X."
Content is for reference only, not financial advice.