Meta Platforms and BlackRock announced a joint venture on Tuesday to build and own a 1-gigawatt data center campus in El Paso, Texas, a project expected to cost roughly $14 billion. Under the deal, BlackRock-managed funds will hold 80% of the venture, while Meta keeps the remaining 20%. Meta is contributing land and partially built construction assets worth about $2.3 billion, while BlackRock puts in roughly $4.9 billion in cash alongside $12.5 billion raised through debt. Meta will also collect a one-time $1 billion distribution to balance the ownership math, then lease the entire campus back under an initial four-year term with room to extend.
The facility, already under construction, is expected to go live in 2028 with Meta as its sole tenant, feeding into the company's broader Meta Compute push to build AI infrastructure and rent out spare computing capacity to other players. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the arrangement lets the company move faster and at greater scale than building everything alone.
The timing says a lot too. Meta shares have slipped roughly 10% this year as investors grow nervous about the sheer scale of AI capital spending, with the company recently raising its 2026 capex outlook to as much as $145 billion. Offloading a chunk of that spend onto BlackRock's books, while still locking in the compute capacity through a lease, looks like Meta's answer to that pressure.
It also reflects a wider pattern across the industry. AI-related bond issuance has already crossed $270 billion this year, nearly double what was raised in all of 2025, as tech giants increasingly lean on Wall Street to finance the infrastructure race rather than footing the bill themselves.
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