BlackRock Bankrolls Meta’s El Paso Data Center in $12B Debt Sale

BlackRock (BLK ) is leading a bond sale of at least $12 billion to build a new Meta data center in El Paso, Texas — and the ownership behind the deal says more about how AI capacity now gets financed than the headline figure does. BlackRock and its infrastructure and private-credit arms own 80% of the roughly 1-gigawatt project, while Meta, the company that will actually run AI workloads inside it, owns just 20% and will lease the campus back. JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley are arranging the sale (MS ) and pitching bond investors this week, according to people familiar with the deal.

The debt is being issued through a holding company tied to BlackRock’s stake in an entity Bloomberg identified as Project Sopaipilla Holdings, with funds run by Global Infrastructure Partners and HPS Investment Partners — both now part of BlackRock — holding the 80%. Pricing is expected early next week.

That structure is the point. It keeps most of the construction debt off Meta’s books: Meta puts in a minority stake, signs a long-term lease, and records the cost as rent rather than capital spending, while the borrowing sits with the BlackRock-controlled owner. For BlackRock, it caps a deliberate shift. CEO Larry Fink spent recent years buying the private-market firms Global Infrastructure Partners and HPS, turning the $15 trillion asset manager into an owner and operator of infrastructure rather than only a buyer of other people’s bonds. On this deal it is doing both — originating the asset and selling the debt against it.

The El Paso project was not BlackRock’s only move on Meta this week. Meta also agreed to lease a large data-center campus under development in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, run by Aligned Data Centers — another asset now inside BlackRock’s orbit. A BlackRock-led group including MGX and Global Infrastructure Partners agreed in October 2025 to buy Aligned for about $40 billion, the largest data-center acquisition on record. The pattern is consistent: BlackRock owns the buildings, Meta rents the compute.

A template Meta already wrote

The El Paso structure copies the one Meta used for Hyperion, its data center in rural Richland Parish, Louisiana. There, private-credit firm Blue Owl owns 80% of the joint venture and Meta 20%, and that entity sold $27 billion in bonds last year — the largest private-debt offering on record, of which BlackRock itself bought more than $3 billion. In July 2026, Meta said it would expand Hyperion to 5 gigawatts, pushing the projected cost toward $50 billion.

The model is spreading because the numbers no longer fit on any single balance sheet. JPMorgan strategists estimated in June 2026 that hyperscalers will spend roughly $5.5 trillion on AI through 2030, much of it borrowed. A Nikkei analysis put the off-balance-sheet debt of the five largest US tech companies — Alphabet (GOOGL ), Microsoft (MSFT ), Amazon (AMZN ), Meta, and Oracle (ORCL ) — at about $1.65 trillion, more than the $1.35 trillion they report directly. Special-purpose vehicles like the El Paso and Louisiana structures are a large part of why that gap keeps widening, and why Wall Street’s biggest banks are competing hard for the fees. Debt has become the default tool for AI capacity, from hyperscalers down to labs like Mistral borrowing to build in Paris.

Where a gigawatt in El Paso comes from

The financial engineering is only half the build; the other half is power, and El Paso is a harder place to find a gigawatt than the deal terms suggest. The city sits outside ERCOT, the main Texas grid, on El Paso Electric’s system — a utility whose entire generating fleet runs around 2,000 megawatts, roughly what Meta’s campus alone will eventually draw.

To serve the first phase, El Paso Electric has asked Texas regulators to approve a 366-megawatt gas plant, the roughly $500 million McCloud facility, wired exclusively to Meta’s site for its first five years before it joins the broader grid. Meta has said it will cover the utility’s costs during that window, add enough clean energy to match the data center’s consumption, and use closed-loop cooling to limit water draw in a desert city. Local groups have still fought the plant, arguing it locks in emissions and could push up rates once the exclusivity period ends.

Meta first broke ground in El Paso in October 2025 and later raised its commitment past $10 billion for a campus targeting 1 gigawatt and more than 300 permanent jobs by 2028. It also recently weighed leasing some of its own capacity to rival Anthropic, a sign of how fluid the line between owner, tenant, and landlord has become in AI infrastructure.

The open question is the one every off-balance-sheet AI deal carries. The bonds are long-dated, but the accelerators inside the buildings depreciate in a handful of years, and the leases anchoring the debt reportedly run shorter than the campuses they finance. BlackRock is betting that AI demand — and Meta’s rent checks — hold long enough to make the owner, not just the tenant, whole on the trade.