Meta has folded its half-built El Paso data centre into a joint venture with BlackRock, formalising a structure that keeps most of a $14bn project off its own books.
Under the agreement, funds managed by BlackRock will own 80% of the Texas campus and Meta the remaining 20%, though Meta stays on as the site’s construction manager, property manager, and sole tenant once the servers come online in 2028.
The venture puts total development at roughly $14bn, and the way that sum is split is really the point of the deal.
BlackRock is contributing about $4.9bn in cash at financial close, while Meta hands over the land and construction-in-progress it has already sunk into the site, worth around $2.3bn, and takes a one-time $1bn distribution to align the ownership.
The balance, some $12.5bn, arrives as debt raised against the project rather than against Meta, which lets the company book its use of the campus as rent instead of capital spending.
That distinction matters more than usual this year, because Meta has guided to $125bn to $145bn in capital expenditure for 2026, a range it raised in April, and it is under real pressure to show that the AI build-out will eventually pay for itself.
The financing has been coming together for weeks. BlackRock lined up the borrowing for the campus earlier this month, after Meta had already assembled a package that briefly looked like a new ceiling for single-site AI financing.
The debt figure crept up as the plan hardened, from the roughly $12bn to $13bn discussed during those rounds to the $12.5bn now baked into the venture.
BlackRock is running the deal through Global Infrastructure Partners and HPS Investment Partners, the two arms it has been pointing at data-centre assets since it bought Aligned Data Centers for $40bn.
The firm now sits on both sides of these transactions, originating the infrastructure and then selling the debt that funds it, and El Paso follows that template closely.
For Meta, the appeal is a model it has used before. In rural Louisiana it kept the majority of its $200bn Hyperion campus off its balance sheet by handing 80% to an outside investor and leasing the site back, and the El Paso structure repeats the arithmetic almost exactly.
The initial lease runs four years with four extension options, which could stretch the arrangement to two decades. Meta has separately said it plans to spend around $600bn on US infrastructure through 2028, though that headline figure is a pledge rather than a committed budget.
The mechanics are not free of risk, since the debt behind these campuses tends to be long-dated while the servers inside them depreciate within a handful of years, and the lease can run shorter than the hardware it is meant to house.
The campus itself is designed to deliver a gigawatt of compute for Meta’s AI systems and its core advertising business, with power expected in 2028, which would make it one of the larger single-site facilities the company has committed to outside Louisiana.
BlackRock says about 2,300 people are already working on the site, that construction should peak above 4,000 jobs, and that roughly 300 permanent roles will remain once it is running.
The company has also promised to train some 12,000 electricians over three years through a programme it calls Future Builders, a nod to the labour shortage now shadowing large data-centre builds.
Mark Zuckerberg framed the venture as a way to move quicker, saying the partnership with BlackRock “allows us to move faster and at greater scale” and tying it to Meta’s stated ambition of building the infrastructure for what he calls superintelligence.
Larry Fink, BlackRock’s chief executive, cast it as a proof point for a business his firm is still assembling, saying the deal showed “the strength and scale of our combined capabilities with GIP and HPS.”
Neither addressed the obvious question underneath the numbers, which is what happens if the compute Meta is buying at this scale takes longer than 2028 to earn its keep.
