MGX explores multi-billion-dollar acquisition of data center operator DayOne in push to dominate AI infrastructure

Abu Dhabi-backed AI investor MGX is reportedly weighing a multibillion-dollar buyout of DayOne, which operates a data center in Singapore. The deal will come as MGX’s first acquisition in Asia and would highlight the mounting competition among the various parties who seek to obtain the necessary data center infrastructures to fuel the growth of AI technology.

DayOne, which has been looking into a U.S.-listed initial public offering IPO with a value of around $20 billion, could still go ahead with its IPO plans.

MGX targets the physical layer of AI

The pursuit of DayOne is indicative of a trend: sovereign-backed investors from the Gulf states are in competition with private equity, hyperscalers (big cloud operators such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud that have large computing capacity infrastructure), and pension funds for securing compute capacity amid the challenges posed by increasing demand for AI computing worldwide.

MGX, a firm that was established two years ago in partnership with Mubadala and G42 as its co-founders, runs under the leadership of Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who acts as the National Security Advisor to the UAE. The firm plans to raise over $100 billion worth of investments in the entire AI value chain, starting from semiconductors to chips, Reuters reported.

That ambition has already produced a string of major bets. MGX has backed xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic, and committed capital to Aligned Data Centers through a $40 billion AI infrastructure fund alongside BlackRock and Nvidia. Separately, the firm took a 15% stake in TikTok’s US operations and invested $2 billion in crypto exchange Binance.

DayOne, affiliated with China’s GDS Holdings, runs data centers in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Japan, and Finland. The company closed a $4.5 billion Series C funding round (a late-stage financing round typically used to accelerate expansion ahead of an eventual public offering) in early June 2026 led by existing investors Coatue and Hillhouse, with new backers including Indonesia’s sovereign wealth fund and Achi Capital Partners.

DayOne said the financing would support expansion across Asia-Pacific and Europe.  Since its inception in 2022, DayOne has secured more than 1.5 gigawatts (GW) of bookings across Asia-Pacific and Europe.

Gulf-backed capital races for compute capacity

The interest of MGX in DayOne coincides with the development of several agreements around AI infrastructure on three continents.

In Europe, MGX is already a shareholder in Campus AI, a collaboration between France’s Bpifrance, Mistral, and Nvidia which has recently announced their plan to grow to 3 GW of compute capacity in multiple sites in France.

Campus AI believes that this growth will help make France the leader in Europe in large-scale and low-carbon AI infrastructure in light of current competition between countries to get such workloads.

Dubai-based DAMAC Digital, another Gulf-backed operator, said in early June that its planned data center pipeline had reached 6,000 megawatts across 13 countries, including sites in Spain, Italy, the Nordics, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines, according to Block News International.

In the United States, the AI Acceleration Partnership between the UAE and Washington has produced Stargate UAE, a project that will deliver up to 5 gigawatts of computing power in Abu Dhabi, with G42, OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, and SoftBank involved. Fortune reported that the first 200-megawatt phase is expected to come online before year-end.

American companies are also spending heavily on supporting infrastructure. Amazon signed a multi-billion-dollar agreement with Corning in early June to expand US production of optical fiber and connectivity products used in data centers, a deal Reuters reported would create 1,000 jobs at Corning’s North Carolina facilities.

A buyout would move MGX beyond minority stakes

The MGX-DayOne talks remain preliminary, and the sources cautioned that a transaction may not happen. DayOne has been weighing a dual listing in Singapore and the US, though the Singapore component is not concrete, Reuters reported. DayOne did not respond to requests for comment. An MGX spokesperson declined to comment.

Assuming that a deal does go through, then it would allow MGX to operate its data centers in a region where the demand for AI compute power is increasing rapidly, and not through minority investments as it has been doing till now.

In the market context, it would convey that the funds from Gulf sovereign wealth funds are now interested in more than just being financial backers and increasingly wants to own the physical layer of AI outright.

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