Meta and BlackRock revealed a massive collaboration on a new $14 billion data center campus in El Paso, Texas, marking a bold move by traditional finance into the AI infrastructure race. BlackRock is taking an 80% stake, leaving Meta with 20%. The project, expected to go live in 2028, will deliver a staggering 1 gigawatt of computing power.

BlackRock is putting up about $4.9 billion in cash equity and spearheading roughly $12.5 billion in debt financing. Meta’s contribution, valued around $2.3 billion, comes mainly in land and existing assets. The deal also includes a $1 billion distribution to Meta. Instead of owning the facility outright, the social media giant will lease computing capacity, allowing it to scale AI resources without locking up its balance sheet.

Wall Street's Growing Appetite for AI Infrastructure

This isn’t Meta’s first time using this financial playbook. The company struck a similar deal with Blue Owl for a Louisiana data center. The El Paso campus builds on Meta’s earlier commitment to invest over $10 billion in the Texas border region announced in March 2026.

Meta plans to spend $600 billion on data centers by 2028. By partnering with investors like BlackRock, it avoids heavy upfront costs while keeping access to critical AI computing power. Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan served as advisers on the transaction, highlighting the deal's significance in the finance and tech worlds.

The enormous energy demands of AI data centers also impact other industries. A single campus consuming 1 gigawatt of power tightens the grid resources, especially in Texas’ ERCOT market, where Bitcoin miners have historically competed fiercely for cheap electricity. This shift could reshape energy availability and costs for crypto mining operations.

BlackRock has been aggressively exploring tokenization, notably through its BUIDL fund, and this partnership underlines the firm’s strategy to deepen its footprint in AI and digital assets.

This material is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.