Volato Unit Secures $1.17B in AI Infrastructure Orders

Volato Group’s Alignment Engine subsidiary has signed two four-year, take-or-pay AI infrastructure orders totaling about $1.17 billion with an undisclosed large AI customer, providing the newly acquired platform with its first major contracted deployment.

The agreements call for phased installation of dedicated, single-tenant GPU clusters at Alignment Engine’s planned Ohio AI infrastructure campus. The first deployment, using AMD MI355X graphics processing units, is scheduled to begin Dec. 31. A second deployment using AMD MI455X GPUs is expected to start June 30, 2027.

The customer has committed to about $133 million in contractual prepayments, including approximately $40 million due after the first order’s execution. Remaining prepayments are tied to specified dates and equipment-shipment milestones, while the balance of the contract value will be paid over the 48-month terms, subject to the agreements’ conditions.

The orders are expected to anchor the campus’s initial phases and reflect an AI-infrastructure model centered on long-term contracted capacity rather than spot-market demand for graphics-processing power. Alignment Engine is developing computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence, machine learning and high-performance computing workloads.

Volato completed its merger with Alignment Engine earlier this month in a transaction that valued Alignment Engine at about $500 million. The combination expanded the company beyond aviation software and private-aviation services into AI data-center infrastructure. The Ohio site already has power, water and water-treatment infrastructure in place, which Volato has said could shorten development time relative to a greenfield data-center project.

Chris Ensey, who became Volato’s chief executive after the merger closed, said the company plans to deploy GPU capacity in phases and sell infrastructure directly to enterprise customers while continuing its aviation technology businesses.