BlackRock is raising $12bn to build Meta a data centre it will own, lend to, and rent out

BlackRock is raising at least $12 billion through a bond sale to build a Meta data centre in El Paso, Texas, with BlackRock owning 80% of the project and Meta owning 20%, allowing Meta to keep the cost off its balance sheet as rent. The deal mirrors Meta's previous Hyperion site in Louisiana and reflects BlackRock CEO Larry Fink's strategy of using its infrastructure and private-credit arms to originate and finance AI infrastructure assets.

On Monday, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley began pitching investors on a bond sale of at least $12 billion, as The Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/blackrock-leads-12-billion-financing-for-new-meta-data-centers-in-texas-e1c3d42c reported. The money will build a Meta data centre in El Paso, Texas. The structure is the story. Who owns what BlackRock and its infrastructure and private-credit arms own 80% of the roughly one-gigawatt project. Meta, the company that will actually run AI inside it, owns just 20% and will lease the campus back. The debt sits with a BlackRock-controlled entity, not with Meta. That keeps most of the cost off Meta’s books, booked as rent rather than capital spending. It is the same off-balance-sheet trick https://thenextweb.com/news/tech-giants-hidden-off-balance-sheet-debt-ai a Nikkei study just pinned at $1.65 trillion across the five biggest US tech firms. Meta wrote the template Meta has done this before. Its Hyperion site in Louisiana https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-hyperion-louisiana-data-centre-50-billion used a joint venture where the credit firm Blue Owl held 80% and Meta 20%. That entity sold $27 billion of bonds last year, the largest private-debt deal on record, and BlackRock bought more than $3 billion of them. El Paso copies the blueprint. Meta also just agreed to lease a project in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, run by Aligned, the developer BlackRock bought for $40bn https://thenextweb.com/news/aligned-data-centers-40-billion-blackrock-mgx . The pattern is consistent: BlackRock owns the buildings, Meta rents the compute. Fink’s long game For Larry Fink, the deal is a payoff. Over the past few years, the $15 trillion asset manager spent about $25 billion buying two private-market firms, Global Infrastructure Partners and HPS, as Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-20/blackrock-s-meta-deal-to-show-the-power-of-25-billion-m-a-spree reported. Both now sit inside BlackRock, and both are backing El Paso. That turns an index-fund giant into an owner-operator. On this deal it does both jobs at once: it originates the asset and sells the debt against it. Fink told analysts last week that the two units were “coming together on the origination side.” The catch The risk is the one every off-balance-sheet AI deal carries. The bonds are long-dated, but the chips https://thenextweb.com/news/nebius-775-million-gpu-backed-debt-financing inside the building depreciate in a few years, and the leases reportedly run shorter than the campuses they finance. BlackRock is betting AI demand, and Meta’s rent, hold long enough to pay it back. It also stacks much of the AI build-out inside one firm. Rivals Blue Owl and Blackstone have led the biggest data-centre financings so far, and the bubble talk https://thenextweb.com/news/masayoshi-son-ai-5-trillion-year-2040-bubble is getting louder. The El Paso campus is due online in 2028. Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.