New financing to fuel further expansion
Blackstone has provided more financing to data center firm Aligned to fuel the latter’s expansion plans.
Blackstone Credit & Insurance (BXCI) and Aligned Data Centers this week announced the successful upsize of their existing senior secured credit facility to fund Aligned’s growth.
The upsize brings BXCI commitments to Aligned to more than $1 billion and is committed entirely by accounts managed by BXCI’s infrastructure & asset-based credit group.
“Our stakeholders are key partners in our journey. We are thankful for their support as we strategically pursue the vast development opportunities driven by AI, cloud, and enterprise services,” said Meghan Baivier, Aligned CFO.
“This issuance is a testament to the market’s confidence in our long-term strategy and the strength of our entire portfolio. It provides us with an efficient capital structure to fuel our long-term growth and continue delivering industry-leading solutions that scale with our customers' evolving needs.”
Aligned has campuses in Chicago, Illinois; Dallas, Texas; Salt Lake City, Utah; Phoenix, Arizona; and Northern Virginia. The company has further sites in development in Maryland, Ohio, Illinois, and Virginia.
“We are thrilled to partner with Aligned, and this financing is consistent with Blackstone’s focus on providing large-scale and flexible high-grade capital solutions to support critical digital infrastructure,” said Rick Campbell, head of US private high-grade credit at BXCI.
Blackstone said the expanded financing will support Aligned’s growth and accelerate the development of more than 5GW of future capacity across the Americas.
BXCI previously loaned Aligned $600 million in March 2024 to fund the build-out of its data center campus in Utah.
Aligned counts Patrizia and CenterSquare amongst its investors; Macquarie Asset Management first invested in Aligned in 2018, joining BlueMountain Capital Management.
Outside of the US, Aligned acquired LATAM-based OData in May 2023 and has a footprint in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. It has also invested in Canadian firm QScale.
As well as QTS and AirTrunk, Blackstone has myriad data center investments, including in Vnet, Lumina CloudInfra, Copeland, Park Place Technologies, and Winthrop Technologies, alongside joint ventures with COPT, Digital Realty, and others. The investment giant has also previously provided financing to liquid-cooled data center provider Colovore and AI cloud firm CoreWeave.
Source: DCD
