Topline
BlackRock is set to take an 80% ownership stake in one of the biggest artificial intelligence data center campuses in the country—Meta’s $14 billion, one gigawatt project in El Paso—in one of the clearest signs yet that Wall Street is becoming a major financier of the AI race and signaling a new model for financing the accompanying infrastructure boom.
Key Facts
Meta and BlackRock on Tuesday announced they were partnering to develop and operate the new, 1,000-acre data center campus in Texas that has been under construction for more than six months and will become one of the country’s largest AI infrastructure projects.
The agreement says Meta will contribute land and in-progress construction assets worth about $2.3 billion and BlackRock will make a cash contribution of about $4.9 billion.
Meta will also receive a $1 billion distribution to align ownership and, in the end, will own only about 20% of the project while BlackRock-managed funds take an 80% ownership stake.
The deal represents a pioneering financing strategy that could reshape how Big Tech pays for increasingly expensive AI infrastructure, the bill for which has spooked investors as capital expenditure forecasts at companies like Meta, Alphabet and other giants continue to grow.
What to watch for
Meta will report its second quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday. The company’s shares dropped about 10%, erasing about $175 billion from its market capitalization in a single day, after a first quarter earnings report included a higher 2026 capital expenditure forecast than previously estimated. Chief Financial Officer Susan Li attributed the increase to higher memory-chip pricing and additional data center costs tied to AI infrastructure.
Investment Firms Are Backing Big Tech’s AI Dreams
Meta has gone all in on using financial firms to back its data centers. The company in October announced a similar deal with Blue Owl Capital to develop, own and finance the record-breaking Hyperion AI data center campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana. The deal created a special-purpose holding company called Beignet Investor to issue about $27 billion in project bonds to fund construction, and Blue Owl funds directly invested about $3 billion in exchange for an 80% ownership stake in the project. Other tech companies are also partnering with financial firms, but in different ways. OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX last year formed a new company, Stargate LLC, to develop AI data centers across the U.S., with an initial goal of investing $100 billion and eventually up to $500 billion. Unlike the Meta projects however, the tech companies and investors are co-owners of the platform. Google and Blackstone created a new joint venture to build a new AI-focused cloud business; Microsoft, BlackRock and state-backed Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX created a new fund structure that allows institutional investors to finance new AI infrastructure; and Broadcom recently partnered with Apollo and Blackstone to create an AI infrastructure platform targeting more than 20 gigawatts of AI compute deployments.
BIG NUMBER
More than 700. That’s how many data centers are actively under construction across 38 U.S. states, according to Texas-based energy marketplace consulting company Electric Choice. Existing data centers are overwhelmingly concentrated in Virginia and Texas.