Meta to build $14B El Paso data center campus with BlackRock
SiliconANGLE Maria Deutscher
Meta and BlackRock are building a $14 billion AI data center in El Paso, Texas. BlackRock owns 80% of it — pricier than Meta's other 1-gigawatt sites, hinting at bigger plans.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Maria Deutscher — read the original for the full story.
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Meta is teaming up with BlackRock, the asset manager, to build a new AI data center campus in El Paso, Texas, and the price tag alone tells a story: $14 billion. The two sides expect to finalize their joint venture soon, with Meta putting in $2.3 billion of physical assets — including facilities already under construction — while BlackRock contributes $4.9 billion in cash and separately hands Meta a $1 billion payment. When the dust settles, BlackRock walks away with an 80% stake and Meta keeps 20%, mirroring the structure Meta used last year when it sold a similar majority stake in a data center to Blue Owl Capital for a $7 billion contribution.
Meta will be the only company using the El Paso site once it's operational in 2028, under a lease with a four-year initial term and four optional renewals. The company says the $14 billion figure covers building costs, power, cooling and networking — but notably not the price of the chips that will actually run inside it. That's a meaningful omission. Look at Meta's Louisiana campus, announced earlier this month at a stated $50 billion, which Bloomberg pegged closer to $250 billion once chips and related costs are folded in. If El Paso follows a similar pattern, the real number could dwarf the headline figure.
What's striking is how El Paso compares to Meta's other 1-gigawatt campuses in Ohio, Indiana and Canada, which the company expects to run around $10 billion each. El Paso costs noticeably more for the same gigawatt of AI-optimized capacity, which suggests either a more advanced data center design or a different purpose altogether. Meta is reportedly building out a cloud infrastructure business, and a campus like this — expensive, purpose-built, arriving in 2028 — would fit neatly into that ambition, especially as a way to eventually recoup some of the massive capital outlay.
And the outlay really is massive. Meta closed out its last fiscal year with $72 billion in capital expenses, but this year that number is expected to land somewhere between $125 billion and $145 billion. That's the financial backdrop against which deals like this one with BlackRock make sense: Meta wants the compute, doesn't want to shoulder the entire bill, and investors like BlackRock are apparently willing to bet big on AI infrastructure paying off. Meanwhile, Meta continues selling access to its newest model, Muse Spark 1.1, through an API — a modest but telling sign of how it's already trying to monetize the AI stack it's spending so heavily to build.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Nobody should be surprised Meta is quietly making chip costs an asterisk on these announcements — it's the oldest trick in the infrastructure-hype playbook, and the Louisiana comparison proves the real bill balloons once silicon enters the picture. Handing 80% ownership to outside capital while keeping all the compute for yourself is a smart way to build an empire without carrying the full risk on your own balance sheet, and BlackRock clearly likes those odds. The real story isn't the data center — it's that Meta looks like it's assembling the bones of a cloud business, one gigawatt-sized campus at a time, and calling it something else for now.
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