Larry Fink wants to talk about electricity. Specifically, the staggering amount of it that artificial intelligence demands, and the even more staggering bill that comes with building it out.
During a CNBC panel on August 10, the BlackRock CEO laid out numbers that make most corporate capital expenditure plans look like rounding errors: the United States needs more than 70 gigawatts of power capacity to support AI operations, at a cost of $50 billion to $60 billion per gigawatt. That translates to roughly $500 billion in immediate funding needs, with trillions more required in the years ahead.
The infrastructure arms race is already underway
The firm’s AI Infrastructure Partnership, known as AIP, was launched in September 2024 alongside Microsoft, Nvidia, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX. The partnership’s mandate: funnel capital into AI data centers and the power infrastructure needed to keep them running. AIP set initial investment targets of up to $100 billion including debt financing.
On July 21, BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners completed a $40 billion acquisition of Aligned Data Centers. That deal represents AIP’s most significant move to date, converting strategy decks into actual megawatts.
