Blue Owl's data-center ask meets a $25 billion income bid

A consortium pairing BlackRock's Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership with IFM Investors is in exclusive talks over the potential acquisition of Stack Infrastructure's Asia Pacific data centers, a portfolio that could be valued at up to $25 billion, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg.

The assets sit in Melbourne, Osaka, Sydney and Tokyo, where the consortium is preparing due diligence, and Stack owner Blue Owl Capital initially sought more than $30 billion; the talks are described as ongoing, which in deal language means nothing is signed.

Set the two valuations side by side and the spread does the arithmetic: more than $5 billion between the ask and the top of the reported range, with no indication of where the two sides might meet or on what basis the $25 billion was struck. Blue Owl's number reads as a build-out valuation, built on land, power pipeline and the option value of another tranche of AI demand, while the consortium's reads as an income valuation, the kind a long-hold infrastructure buyer would pay for data centers that already exist. Bloomberg does not describe the portfolio's capacity, lease terms or tenant mix, so the argument between those two underwriting models will be settled in diligence rather than in a headline.

The buyer side is a vehicle built for scale: AIP was founded by BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners—now part of BlackRock—MGX, Microsoft and NVIDIA, and counts the Kuwait Investment Authority and Temasek among its financial anchor investors. That cap table, paired here with IFM Investors, suggests a mandate organized around securing capacity at scale rather than around the return on a single development cycle.

Consortiums of this type have become the route institutional capital takes into digital infrastructure at scale, as the largest allocators assemble vehicles with sovereign and corporate anchors and buy platforms whole rather than compete plot by plot—which is why the same names keep appearing on the buy side of the sector's large platform trades. IFM's presence next to AIP in the Stack talks extends that pattern to APAC assets, and the region is about to find out what it does to pricing.

AIP has run a version of this trade before: in July, a consortium of AIP, MGX and GIP acquired 100 percent of the equity in Aligned Data Centers from private infrastructure funds managed by Macquarie Asset Management and its co-invest partners, at an enterprise value of approximately $40 billion, a transaction described as one of the largest private investments made in digital infrastructure. The shape of the Stack talks rhymes—a whole-platform purchase from an institutional seller, at a scale few buyers can underwrite—but the participants differ, with MGX and GIP sitting in the Aligned deal and IFM in this one, and so does the seller, which here is an owner rather than a fund manager exiting a position.

The two headline numbers are not like for like, because Aligned's $40 billion was an enterprise value for a platform while the $25 billion is a valuation for a regional portfolio inside a global business; anyone setting them side by side is comparing scopes rather than multiples, and the report supplies nothing to bridge the two. Still, the Stack talks show that a regional operating portfolio can draw a buyer group of this size at all, in a market where—as this publication has argued—industrial pricing now turns on rents and scarcity, the operator, the land basis and the data-center pull rather than on the building.

Blue Owl has been working more than one angle to get a mark on its data-center book. Its $6.5 billion data center REIT seed, reported here in September, would put a public number on private valuations; the Stack Asia Pacific talks would produce the private one, and the lower of the two is the figure other owners will end up citing.

If the talks produce a deal, the consequences reach past Stack: it would give the region's owners a comparable of genuine size, and comparables are what move capital—July's $33.8 billion of data-center deals carried commercial real estate volume to a two-decade high and showed how quickly transactions follow a printed number. Sellers holding APAC digital assets would get a defensible mark, buyers a ceiling.

Mapletree's 22-building offering asks the same question from the sell side, whether buyers will pay for stabilized data-center income or still price the class as a construction story, and the Stack talks answer it with a buyer that does not need the build-out narrative to underwrite a return.

The supply side is where the counterargument lives: a Brookings paper covered here this week puts the AI capital program at $10.3 trillion and assumes 227 gigawatts of proposed data-center capacity never gets built. If any meaningful share of that downside arrives, the assets that hold value are the energized and leased ones, which favors a portfolio that already exists over a pipeline that still needs the demand to arrive. On that reading, $25 billion is less a discount to the earlier $30 billion than a different description of the same assets.

Diligence comes next, and Bloomberg is explicit that the $25 billion is a ceiling on a conversation rather than a term of a deal. The figure that will travel is whatever price per unit of operating capacity the two sides eventually agree on, because that is the comparable every APAC platform seller will carry into its next negotiation. A deal near the reported top gives the region's owners their benchmark; no deal leaves Blue Owl holding an asset it sought more than $30 billion for and a market still waiting for a number it can use.