ACS, a Spanish multinational company specialising in construction, engineering, and infrastructure development, is reportedly close to inking a €23 billion deal with BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners to develop data centres.

The news was first reported by Spanish newspaper Expansion on Thursday, with the newspaper citing unnamed sources.

According to the publication, sources added that under the agreement, asset management company Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) will acquire a stake in the ACS Digital & Energy unit, which focuses on the development of data centres and driving the energy transition through renewable projects.

The American infrastructure investment fund, which makes selected equity and bond investments in markets around the world, will reportedly take a share in the form of €5 billion in equity capital and €18 billion in debt.

According to the ACS website, the company had set a target for its data centre business to achieve a valuation of between €3 billion and €5 billion by 2030.

The announced partnership with GIP would bring the valuation to the upper end of that range, according to Reuters, as rising demand for AI processing and limited energy capacity are driving digital infrastructure valuations to record levels.

The Spanish construction company said it will update its data centre strategy at an investor day on Friday.

Earlier this month, Microsoft and neocloud provider G43 announced a 200-megawatt (MW) expansion of datacentre capacity in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as they look to boost the nation’s digital transformation.

The move is part of Microsoft's announcement of a £10.5 billion investment in the UAE and aims to provide the UAE with world-class cloud and AI infrastructure, strengthening Microsoft Azure's sovereign cloud services in the region.

During the same week, Verizon also announced an agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build long-distance, high-capacity fibre optic pathways to connect AWS data centres.

The new fibre optic pathways aim to support AWS in delivering and scaling cloud services for customers building and deploying advanced AI applications at scale.

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