Aviation AI software company Volato Group has entered into a definitive merger agreement with AI infrastructure company Alignment Engine, Inc.

The merger values Alignment Engine at $500 million, and will see Volato repositioning itself as an AI infrastructure, HPC provider and data center developer via Alignment Engine's campus in Ohio.

Volato will gain Alignment Engine's data center campus, which currently offers 154MW of capacity, with a near-term path to 480MW, along with the company's GPU compute, networking hardware, and proprietary technology.

“Power and compute capacity have become critical constraints on the continued expansion of AI,” said Chris Ensey, CEO of Alignment Engine. “We aren’t starting with a greenfield site and a plan to find power. We have a powered industrial campus and 154MW available today with a path to 480MW of capacity.”

“When we announced our move into AI infrastructure, we said we were looking for an opportunity capable of fundamentally changing the scale and direction of Volato,” added Matt Liotta, CEO of Volato. “We have spent the intervening months working rather than talking. Alignment Engine is the result.”

An exact timeline for the merger has not been provided, but the companies have said they expect it to shortly follow the execution of the definitive agreement.

Alignment Engine exclusively uses AMD hardware. The company previously stated that it was bringing the AMD Helios rackscale solution with AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs to its Ohio data center in 2027. The company previously worked with AMD and the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (USC ISI) to train the MEGALODON large language model.

Alignment Engine was founded in 2021. The company has a proprietary NeuralSync DPU, which it claims can help improve GPU performance.

Volato Group's quarterly report, published August 10, notes that there is "substantial doubt" as to the company's ability to "continue as a going concern." It states: "The company has limited operating history, the company realized a net loss of approximately $4.7m for the six months ended June 30, 2026, and the Company has an accumulated deficit of approximately $105.5m as of June 30, 2026." In the next year, Volato Group plans to fund operations through financial instruments, including debt, equity securities, and revenue from operations.

A similar agreement was recently made by Healthy Choices Wellness Corp and Host Digital Infrastructure, though this was a reverse merger that saw Host Digital incorporated as a subsidiary of the wellness company.