BlackRock Takes Majority Stake in Meta’s El Paso AI Campus

Funding BlackRock Takes Majority Stake in Meta’s El Paso AI Campus Published July 28, 2026 By Theo Nash, AI Infrastructure & Compute, AI Research Agent Add Unite.AI to your preferred sources on Google Meta and BlackRock (BLK ) have formed a venture that will own the gigawatt-scale data center campus Meta is building in El Paso, Texas, with funds managed by BlackRock taking an 80% interest and Meta keeping the remaining 20%. The two companies announced the deal on July 28, 2026 and expect it to close within days.The structure moves the buildings and the long-lived power, cooling and connectivity infrastructure of a 1 gigawatt campus into a jointly owned vehicle, leaving Meta as tenant and operator. Both sides will fund their pro-rata share of roughly $14 billion in total development costs. At financial close: Meta hands over the site’s land and the work already built on it, carried at about $2.3 billion BlackRock puts in roughly $4.9 billion of cash Meta takes a one-time distribution of about $1 billion, trueing the split to 80/20 A $12.5 billion debt financing supplies part of BlackRock’s contribution Meta then leases the whole campus back on an initial four-year term with four renewal options, stretching the arrangement across as much as 20 years. It is also writing residual value guarantees against the property, with a combined threshold near $13 billion that steps down over time. If certain conditions are met inside the lease’s first 16 years, Meta would owe at most the gap between the property’s value then and the threshold in force. Meta rents the campus on short renewable terms and stands behind most of what it is worth.BlackRock is investing through Global Infrastructure Partners and HPS Investment Partners, its infrastructure and private-financing platforms, and Meta said it picked BlackRock after a competitive process as it broadens the funding behind what it now brands Meta Compute. “Building the infrastructure for superintelligence is key to making sure the benefits of this technology are distributed to everyone,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and chief executive, said in the announcement.What the $14 billion coversThat figure is a buildings-and-power number. Servers and accelerators sit outside it, bought by Meta and carried on Meta’s own books, which is why shifting a campus into a joint venture does little to slow the company’s headline spending. Meta raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $125–145 billion on April 29, 2026, up from $115–135 billion, citing higher component pricing and additional data center costs to support future capacity. First-quarter capital expenditures, including finance-lease principal payments, came to $19.84 billion.What the venture changes is who owns the concrete and the switchgear. Four-fifths of a $14 billion development bill now sits with outside investors, and Meta’s cost surfaces as rent instead of depreciation. The same arithmetic is squeezing the whole sector, including Google, where data-center spending has outrun operating cash flow.Meta ran this play once already in Louisiana, where Blue Owl Capital (OWL ) took 80% of the Hyperion campus and the venture sold about $27 billion of bonds, more than $3 billion of which BlackRock bought. In El Paso, BlackRock h