I'm Andrew Ross Sorkin, co-host of Squatbox along with Joe Kernan and Becky Quick,

and this is Five Things to Know before today's opening bell.

It is the first Friday of October, but the D.C. shutdown means that there will be no monthly

jobs report released today. In corporate news, BlackRock's global infrastructure partners,

importantly now in advance talks to acquire aligned data centers.

Now, Bloomberg says that deal could be valued at $40 billion.

And earlier this week, reports said that global infrastructure partners was also looking at other big deals.

Those included a potential takeover of the power company AES Corporation.

Shares of USA Rare Earth soaring, company's CEO telling CNBC that the rare earth

miner is in close communication with the White House. Earlier this week, the Trump administration

took a 5% equity stake in lithium Americas. And in July, the Defense Department took a 15%

stake in MP materials. Meantime, Alphabet has now been preparing to spin off or sell its life sciences unit Verily,

a Google executive saying that company has been working for the past two and a half years

to technologically decouple Verily, moving it off of Google's own infrastructure and onto the Google Cloud platform.

And let the Taylor Swift mania begin again.

Swift's highly anticipated 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl,

dropping at midnight, and we hear that there are several references

to her fiance, Kansas City Chief's tight end, Travis Kelsey.

There's apparently a lot of demand for physical music-like CDs and vinyl fans lining up at the Target store here in Manhattan last night

to be the first to get their hands on the new album. So, are you downloading on Spotify?

What are you doing?

We share Apple Music.

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