Meta And BlackRock Team Up on $14B Texas AI Data Center Campus

META and BLK unveiled a roughly $14 billion joint venture on July 28 to build a one-gigawatt AI data center campus in northeast El Paso, Texas [doc7 doc8]. The structure matters more than the headline figure: BlackRock-managed funds hold about 80% of the venture and Meta about 20%, with Meta contributing land and construction in progress worth roughly $2.3 billion while the BlackRock funds put in about $4.9 billion of cash alongside proceeds from $12.5 billion of debt financing [doc7 doc8].

That split moves the bulk of the campus off Meta's balance sheet and onto private capital at a moment when investors are scrutinizing hyperscaler capital spending rather than rewarding it. It is a significant commitment but not the company's largest: Meta is separately developing the Hyperion campus in Louisiana at around $27 billion [doc7 doc1].

BLK shares rose about 3.55% on the announcement day, a move that reflects how quickly infrastructure fund mandates have become a growth line for asset managers rather than a sideline. Matt Britzman of Hargreaves Lansdown noted the spending "raises valid questions about cash flow, future operating costs, and investment returns, particularly as Meta doesn't (for now) have a large cloud business selling spare capacity to external customers" .

For BlackRock the deal reinforces a position as a default capital partner for AI infrastructure, and an asset manager warehousing single-tenant compute capacity is a template other hyperscalers may copy. The open question is timing: the campus is targeted to come online around 2028, and the return depends on Meta's compute demand still being there when it does . What to watch is whether Meta's next capital expenditure guidance leans further on off-balance-sheet vehicles of this kind, and whether debt-funded compute build-outs start drawing the same scrutiny as on-balance-sheet spend.

Related Stocks

• BLK
• META
• ORCL
• GOOGL
• MSFT