MGX Moves From Minority Stakes to Direct Control With DayOne Acquisition Bid

Published by James Harris on June 20, 2026June 20, 2026

Abu Dhabi’s MGX is in preliminary talks to acquire DayOne, a Singapore-based data center operator affiliated with China’s GDS Holdings, in a deal that would mark the firm’s first outright acquisition in Asia and its first move beyond minority-stake investing into direct infrastructure ownership. DayOne, which had been exploring a US IPO at around a $20 billion valuation, closed a $4.5 billion Series C in early June 2026 and has secured more than 1.5 gigawatts of bookings across Asia-Pacific and Europe.

The pattern here is deliberate and accelerating. MGX, founded two years ago under the leadership of Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan with Mubadala and G42 as co-founders, has backed xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic, committed capital to Aligned Data Centers through a $40 billion fund alongside BlackRock and Nvidia, taken a 15% stake in TikTok’s US operations, and invested $2 billion in [Binance](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/13/abu-dhabis-mgx-to-invest-2-billion-in-crypto-exchange-binance.html). The firm has stated ambitions to deploy over $100 billion across the full AI value chain. What a DayOne buyout would add is operational control over physical compute capacity in Southeast Asia, a region where demand is growing faster than supply and where MGX currently has no owned infrastructure. The industrial-scale power procurement race that Bitcoin miners briefly dominated after 2017 has been fully absorbed by sovereign-backed AI capital, and the Gulf states are among the most aggressive participants.

A buyout of DayOne would not be a bet on AI. It would be a bet that whoever controls the physical layer controls the margin.

Reuters reported the talks remain preliminary and a transaction may not happen, with DayOne also weighing a dual listing in Singapore and the US. The competitive context makes the logic clear regardless: Dubai-based DAMAC Digital has announced a 6,000 megawatt pipeline across 13 countries, Stargate UAE is targeting 5 gigawatts of compute in Abu Dhabi with G42, OpenAI, Oracle, and Nvidia involved, and MGX is already a shareholder in France’s Campus AI project targeting 3 gigawatts of capacity. Against that backdrop, Nvidia’s grip on data center GPU supply means every operator building at scale, including those seeking alternatives to its architecture, faces the same fundamental constraint: securing sites and power before competitors do.

DayOne’s Series C included Indonesia’s sovereign wealth fund among new backers, which signals that Southeast Asian governments are already positioning themselves as stakeholders in the region’s compute infrastructure. If MGX proceeds, it would need to navigate that dynamic alongside DayOne’s existing