Technical giants Microsoft and BlackRock are part of a group of companies collaborating to pull together up to $100 billion to develop data centers for artificial intelligence and the energy infrastructure to power them.
Microsoft and BlackRock, along with Global Infrastructure Partners and MGX, have announced the formation of the Global Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Investment Partnership (GAIIP), which was announced in a press release on Tuesday.
The group seeks to raise $30 billion initially, with a target of up to $100 billion from debt financing.
As AI models like ChatGPT become popular, technical companies are investing heavily in data centers equipped with Nvidia GPUs. However, the high power consumption of these GPUs and increasing demand have created challenges in expanding data center capacity.
Besides the ongoing investments required to expand its Azure public cloud infrastructure, Microsoft is making more investments to support AI customers like OpenAI.
Microsoft announced in July that its capital expenditures for the fiscal fourth quarter, including the value of assets acquired through finance leases, amounted to $19 billion.
In January, BlackRock announced its intention to acquire Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) for $3 billion in cash and around 12 million shares of BlackRock common stock. The deal between BlackRock-GIP is set to close in October.
