BlackRock is raising $12 billion to finance a massive Meta data center in El Paso, Texas. The $12 billion debt will fund a roughly one-gigawatt project slated to go online in 2028.
BlackRock’s role is hands-on. It will own the buildings, lend the money, and collect the rent. Meta owns just 20% of the project and will lease the campus back from BlackRock. This setup keeps most borrowing off Meta’s balance sheet.
The debt sits with a BlackRock-controlled entity, not Meta, echoing a blueprint Meta followed in Louisiana. There, a joint venture with Blue Owl gave BlackRock’s partner 80% ownership, Meta took 20%, and Meta leased the facility.
BlackRock’s infrastructure and private-credit arms now hold 80% of the El Paso project. This comes after acquiring two private-market firms, Global Infrastructure Partners and HPS, for about $25 billion. Larry Fink, BlackRock’s CEO, says the “marriage of BlackRock, HPS, and GIP across the board on the origination side is only accelerating.”
Meta has been active in private-debt markets, selling $27 billion of bonds last year, with BlackRock snapping up over $3 billion. Meta’s AI model upgrade, released in August, aims to rival OpenAI and Anthropic. The new data center will support those ambitions.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg notes demand for compute capacity. “Almost every week there are different companies that come to us from outside asking us … if we have compute that they could buy from us at some premium to what we’ve bought it at.” Meta’s leasing strategy extends beyond its own needs. It recently agreed to lease capacity to Anthropic, an AI startup, and has a project in Pennsylvania run by Aligned, a developer BlackRock acquired.
This deal is about more than servers. It’s a financial engineering play. BlackRock originates the asset, sells the debt against it, owns 80%, and collects rent. Meta’s ownership stake is minor, keeping the heavy borrowing invisible to its balance sheet.
El Paso’s data center is a sign of the cloud infrastructure arms race. Data centers are expected to use four times more electricity by 2035. Companies like Meta are locking in long-term capacity while keeping their balance sheets clean.
BlackRock’s control of infrastructure debt and ownership stakes in these projects positions it as a key player in the future of cloud computing. Meta’s strategy to lease rather than own signals new financial models for building tech infrastructure at scale.
Based on
- BlackRock is raising $12bn to build Meta a data centre it will own, lend to, and rent out — thenextweb.com
- BlackRock’s M&A spree comes into clear view | Semafor — semafor.com
- Meta Is Reportedly Considering A Multibillion-Dollar Data Center Deal With Anthropic — engadget.com
- Meta in talks with Anthropic to lease computing capacity — ctvnews.ca
- Data centers expected to use 4x more electricity by 2035 | TechCrunch — techcrunch.com
