A consortium backed by BlackRock and IFM Investors is in exclusive talks to acquire Stack Infrastructure’s Asia-Pacific data centre portfolio in a deal valued at between $20 billion and $25 billion. The group includes the BlackRock-backed Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), an AI infrastructure investment vehicle co-founded with Microsoft, Nvidia, xAI and MGX.
The portfolio spans major data centre markets in Japan, Australia and Malaysia, including Tokyo, Osaka, Sydney, Melbourne and Johor Bahru. The investor group is preparing to conduct due diligence on the assets as negotiations continue with Stack Infrastructure’s owner, Blue Owl Capital.
Blue Owl had reportedly sought more than $30 billion for the portfolio earlier this year, but current negotiations have placed the potential valuation at $20 billion to $25 billion. The transaction has not been finalized, and talks could still be extended or fail to result in an agreement.
$25 billion for data centres!
A consortium backed by BlackRock $BLK and IFM is reportedly in exclusive talks to buy Stack Infrastructure’s Asia-Pacific portfolio from Blue Owl $OWL.
The assets span Tokyo, Osaka, Sydney and Melbourne. The BlackRock-backed AI Infrastructure… pic.twitter.com/88AxQZ4vTB
— Inorganic Growth Enabler (@harjitrathore) September 24, 2026
Crypto industry divided over BlackRock’s $25B data centre push
The potential acquisition is drawing support from parts of the crypto industry that see expanding AI infrastructure as a catalyst for machine-to-machine payments.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has argued that autonomous AI agents need dedicated wallets and payment rails because existing systems are not designed for fast, small-value transactions.
“If you’re in crypto, pivot to AI.”
I used to hear versions of this, and it’s the wrong way to think about the world. It’s zero sum, scarcity thinking.
Crypto is a general purpose technology. It’s infrastructure, the same way electricity or the internet is infrastructure. It…
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) July 26, 2026
The opposing view centres on concentration. DePIN advocates and other crypto participants have raised concerns that greater ownership of physical compute infrastructure by major financial and technology firms could run against blockchain’s decentralization model. The debate is particularly relevant as the proposed deal would give the consortium exposure to major data-centre markets across Asia-Pacific.
BlackRock’s head of digital assets, Robbie Mitchnick, publicly noted that institutional clients see most utility concentrated in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stablecoins, calling many other tokens “nonsense.” This has drawn criticism from crypto participants who argue that specialized DePIN layer-1 blockchains are being unfairly overlooked by institutional giants.
Could BlackRock’s thesis push more pivot digital-asset infrastructure?
BlackRock’s new The Machine-Native Economy September 2026 research links rising AI compute demand with potential growth in digital-asset infrastructure. The firm says AI agents could increasingly use stablecoins to pay for data, APIs and computing resources through programmable blockchain rails.
The connection to the Asia-Pacific expansion is that more data-centre capacity could create a larger market for computing resources that can eventually be represented and settled digitally. BlackRock identifies standardized claims on compute capacity as a potential digital-asset use case, allowing computing capacity to be financed, transferred and potentially used as collateral.
That puts the data-centre buildout alongside the emerging DePIN and tokenization narrative, where physical infrastructure and blockchain-based markets can intersect. The thesis remains forward-looking, but BlackRock’s research already describes AI as “machine-native intelligence” and digital assets as “machine-native money,” with Ethereum currently holding the largest share of tokenized real-world assets.
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