Meta Partners with BlackRock for $14B Texas AI Data Center

META and BlackRock have formed a joint venture to develop and operate a roughly $14 billion AI data center campus in El Paso, Texas. BlackRock-managed funds take an 80% ownership stake, with Meta retaining 20%. The campus is already under construction and is expected to deliver about 1 gigawatt of compute capacity as it begins coming online in 2028.

The structure matters more than the headline number. Meta contributes land and in-progress construction assets valued at roughly $2.3 billion, while BlackRock makes a cash contribution of about $4.9 billion, a portion of which is financed through $12.5 billion of debt raised at the venture level. Meta also receives a roughly $1 billion distribution to align the ownership split. In practice Meta converts capital it had already sunk into the site into a minority position in a facility that someone else finances, rather than carrying the full build on its own balance sheet.

That is the theme investors are being asked to price. Hyperscalers are building AI capacity faster than operating cash flow can fund it, and the gap is increasingly being closed by debt and outside asset managers rather than retained earnings. BlackRock joins a widening set of financial sponsors underwriting compute infrastructure, a pattern that also showed up in Nvidia's involvement in financing an OpenAI data center campus. The appeal to Meta is capex discipline heading into a quarter where AI spending is the central question; the appeal to BlackRock is a long-duration, contracted-cash-flow asset.

The timing is deliberate: the venture was disclosed a day before Meta reports Q2 results, when capital-expenditure guidance is the number the market will focus on. Watch whether Meta's stated capex range moves now that a gigawatt-scale campus sits mostly off its own books, how the $12.5 billion of venture-level debt is treated in disclosures, and whether the 2028 energization timeline holds in a market where power interconnection, not construction, is the binding constraint.

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