Larry Fink

Laurence Fink (born 1952) co-founded BlackRock in 1988 and built it into the world’s largest asset manager, overseeing more than $11 trillion. His annual letters to CEOs and investors have long set agendas for global capital — and in the AI era he has positioned BlackRock as the boom’s chief financier rather than a mere shareholder.

Bankrolling the build-out

In September 2024, BlackRock, its Global Infrastructure Partners arm, Microsoft and Abu Dhabi’s MGX launched what became the AI Infrastructure Partnership, seeking $30 billion in equity and up to $100 billion including debt to build data centers and the power plants to feed them. Fink called it a multi-trillion-dollar long-term opportunity. Nvidia and xAI joined the consortium in March 2025, and in October 2025 the partnership struck its signature deal: the roughly $40 billion acquisition of Aligned Data Centers, one of the largest data-center transactions ever.

Fink has consistently pushed back on AI-bubble fears, arguing the demand for compute and electricity is real and structural, and he frames the constraint as energy and capital rather than appetite. He has also argued AI could ultimately be deflationary — lifting productivity in economies with shrinking workforces — while acknowledging in the near term that the build-out strains power grids.

Critics note the circularity risk of the AI economy’s biggest players financing one another’s expansion, and BlackRock’s scale means Fink profits from the boom he narrates. But his bet is unambiguous: BlackRock has made AI infrastructure one of its defining investment themes for the decade.