Larry Fink, Paul Tebbit and Thomas Mueller-Borja

Led by Paul Tebbit and Thomas Mueller-Borja, BlackRock Real Estate manages $28 billion of real estate, with investments across asset classes and various real estate investment trusts. Its partners include Simon Property Group, the retail giant; Welltower, the senior housing conglomerate; and Prologis, the logistics powerhouse. 

But, in mid-2025, the firm made several big moves. In June, it acquired ElmTree Funds, a $7.3 billion real estate private equity firm with a specialty in net-lease and build-to-suit single-tenant properties across industrial, office and health care. One month before this deal, BlackRock closed a $12 billion acquisition of Acra Lending, an alternative mortgage lender that is now integrated into several BlackRock-managed funds.

Then the firm continued its push into the data center investment space as well, as BlackRock formed what it calls the AI Infrastructure Partnership with Microsoft, Nvidia, MGX (an Abu Dhabi-based fund) and Elon Musk’s xAI, and led the joint venture’s $40 billion purchase late last year of Aligned Data Center, a national data center provider with more than 50 assets and 50 gigawatts of power capacity. 

“With this investment in Aligned Data Centers, we further our goal of delivering the infrastructure necessary to power the future of AI,” said Larry Fink, BlackRock’s CEO and chairman of the company’s AI Infrastructure Partnership.

Fink is not merely content with entering the data center space — he’s also looking to merge commercial real estate with cryptocurrency, as he argued publicly last year that in the future “every asset,” including stocks, bonds and real estate, will be placed on the blockchain.

Even so, BlackRock remains a believer in brick and mortar. Last year, the firm expanded its existing footprint at 50 Hudson Yards in New York City to 1.24 million square feet and now leases almost half the space in the 3 million-square-foot, 77-story skyscraper.

Fink suggested in his April 2025 shareholder letter that his firm will continue an aggressive push into commercial real estate and other types of illiquid assets

“The future standard portfolio may look more like 50/30/20 — stocks, bonds and private assets like real estate, infrastructure and private credit,” Fink wrote.