Meta and BlackRock Launch $14B Joint Venture for 1 GW AI Data Center in Texas

Summary: Meta and BlackRock announced a joint venture to build a one-gigawatt AI data center campus in El Paso, Texas, at roughly $14 billion in total development cost — with BlackRock funds taking an 80% stake financed largely through debt.

Key Facts

• BlackRock-managed funds: 80% ownership stake, ~$4.9B cash contribution, plus $12.5B in debt financing; Meta: 20% stake via $2.3B in contributed land and in-progress construction assets
• 1 GW campus capacity; Meta remains sole tenant, construction manager, and property manager once servers go live in 2028
• Deal structure allows Meta to monetize in-progress assets while keeping operational control — a capital-light model for funding massive AI buildouts
• Meta's annual AI infrastructure spending was recently revised upward to $60–65 billion; the JV offloads a portion of that onto private capital

Why It Matters

This is among the first times a single AI infrastructure project has attracted over $10 billion in private equity capital, signaling that the scale of AI compute investment has outgrown what tech companies can self-fund alone. If this structure repeats across the industry, capital markets — not just tech company balance sheets — will increasingly set the pace of AI infrastructure expansion.

Read More

• Meta, BlackRock partner on $14 billion El Paso data center venture — CNBC
• Meta, BlackRock partner on US$14 billion El Paso data centre — BNN Bloomberg