Meta El Paso data center plan puts BlackRock into $14B AI campus
Meta and BlackRock plan a $14B AI data center campus in El Paso, with Meta as sole tenant and BlackRock owning 80%.
By Wei-Lin Zhao · AI Correspondent
· 3 min read
Meta Platforms announced plans for a $14 billion Meta El Paso data center campus with BlackRock, adding another 1-gigawatt AI buildout to the company’s infrastructure pipeline. The deal matters because Meta is again using outside capital to fund AI data centers while retaining guaranteed access to the compute capacity it says it needs.
The companies expect to complete a joint venture agreement in the coming days, according to Meta. Under the planned structure, Meta would put in $2.3 billion of physical assets, including facilities already under construction at the site. BlackRock would invest $4.9 billion and make an additional $1 billion payment to Meta.
BlackRock would own 80% of the El Paso campus, while Meta would keep the remaining 20%. Meta said it will be the only user of the site when it starts operating in 2028. The lease is set to run for an initial four years, with four optional renewal periods.
What is Meta building in El Paso?
Meta says the El Paso campus is designed to provide 1 gigawatt of AI-optimized computing capacity. In data center terms, that figure describes the power scale of the facility, which is the binding constraint for large AI training and inference deployments as much as the availability of chips.
The company said the $14 billion budget covers development costs for the buildings as well as power, cooling and networking infrastructure. Meta did not include the cost of the chips the campus will run, which means the full cost of the project could be higher than the announced figure.
That omission is material. Earlier this month, Meta announced plans to spend more than $50 billion on a Louisiana data center campus. Bloomberg later reported that the Louisiana project’s total price could reach $250 billion when chips and related items are included.
Why BlackRock is involved
The El Paso structure follows a pattern Meta has already used for AI infrastructure. Last year, the company sold an 80% stake in its Louisiana campus to Blue Owl Capital, which made a $7 billion cash contribution to that project.
For Meta, the model shifts a large share of data center ownership to financial investors while preserving operational access through lease arrangements. For BlackRock, the agreement would put capital behind a hard-asset AI infrastructure project backed by a single hyperscale tenant.
Meta has announced other 1-gigawatt data center projects over the past two years in Ohio, Indiana and Canada. The company expects those three sites to cost about $10 billion each, according to the announcement. The higher $14 billion budget for El Paso suggests a different facility design or a more expensive build plan, though Meta did not specify the reason.
The company’s AI infrastructure spending is rising sharply. Meta has reported $72 billion in capital expenses and expects that figure to reach between $125 billion and $145 billion this year. The company has also been reported by Bloomberg to be building a cloud infrastructure business to sell excess AI compute, which could help monetize capacity that is not used internally.
Meta already sells access to its Muse Spark 1.1 AI model through an application programming interface, allowing other companies to build the model into their own software. The company did not say whether the El Paso campus will support that API business, internal AI workloads, or a future cloud offering.
This story draws on original reporting from SiliconANGLE.
