Meta and BlackRock Form $14 Billion Venture for Texas AI Data Center

14:30 · July 29, 2026

The El Paso campus is one of Meta’s largest AI infrastructure commitments to date, structured so that funds managed by BlackRock hold an 80 percent stake in the venture while Meta retains 20 percent, an arrangement that lets Meta expand its compute footprint without carrying the entire cost on its own balance sheet. Meta is contributing land and construction-in-progress assets valued at roughly $2.3 billion, while BlackRock is putting in about $4.9 billion in cash, a portion of which is being financed through $12.5 billion in debt. Meta will lease the entire campus back from the joint venture under an initial four-year term with four additional four-year options, giving it flexibility over what could stretch into a 20-year relationship with the site. The one-gigawatt campus is expected to bring its first computing capacity online in 2028, and the project is projected to support more than 4,000 construction jobs at its peak along with roughly 300 permanent operational jobs once complete. The deal is part of a broader pattern of AI hyperscalers turning to asset managers and private capital to fund the enormous buildout of data center capacity that frontier model training and inference now demand, spreading both the cost and the risk of that expansion beyond the tech companies themselves.