BlackRock Leads $12 Billion Debt Financing for New Meta Data Center in Texas

BlackRock’s $12 Billion Debt Strategy for El Paso

BlackRock has mandated JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley to arrange a bond sale targeting at least $12 billion to fund a massive data center campus in El Paso, Texas, according to Bloomberg. The project, which aims to provide close to 1 gigawatt of capacity, is being developed through a joint venture where BlackRock holds an 80% stake, while Meta owns the remaining 20%.

This financing structure is designed to keep the significant capital costs off Meta’s corporate books. By holding the debt within a BlackRock-controlled entity, Meta effectively treats the arrangement as a lease rather than direct capital expenditure. This approach mirrors a previous collaboration between the two firms: a data center megacampus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, which was financed by $27 billion in debt, with BlackRock acquiring more than $3 billion of those bonds.

The Shift to Owner-Operator Status

For BlackRock, the El Paso transaction represents a strategic shift from index-fund management toward becoming an active owner-operator of digital infrastructure.

Larry Fink, BlackRock’s CEO, noted that the firm’s various infrastructure and credit units are coming together on the origination side, allowing the company to originate assets and sell debt against them simultaneously, as reported by The Next Web. This week, BlackRock also closed the acquisition of data center provider Aligned, a deal involving the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership—a joint venture between BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners and the Emirati investment firm MGX.

Market Risks and the AI Infrastructure Boom

While tech companies continue to pour money into computing power, the scale of these investments is drawing comparisons to the telecom boom of 2000. For firms like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, capital expenditure for AI now accounts for a significant portion of total sales.

However, the off-balance-sheet nature of these deals carries inherent risks. The bonds supporting projects like the El Paso campus are long-dated, while the underlying hardware—the high-performance chips—depreciates rapidly. Furthermore, there is a mismatch in some cases between the duration of the debt and the length of the leases. BlackRock is essentially betting that the demand for AI compute will remain robust enough to sustain Meta’s rent payments over the life of the long-term financing.

Global Policy Shifts in Data Center Investment

The race to secure computing capacity is not limited to the United States. In India, the government recently introduced significant tax incentives to attract global firms, promising to exempt outbound services provided by data centers from taxation until 2047.

This announcement helps in bringing clarity to foreign companies and lends stability in (their) tax position in India till 2047, said Vaibhav Gupta, a partner at the tax firm Dhruva Advisors. Despite these incentives, India faces significant hurdles, including power shortages and what a government agency previously described as the worst water crisis in its history, both of which are critical resources for operating large-scale data centers.

As of July 2026, the El Paso project remains in the financing stage, with the facility expected to come online in 2028.