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Meta and funds managed by BlackRock have formed a joint venture to develop a data center campus in El Paso, Texas. Meta is putting more than $10 billion into the project. BlackRock-managed funds own 80%.

The ownership split is the structural story. Meta secures dedicated compute capacity without carrying the full asset on its own balance sheet. Institutional investors — in this case BlackRock — take the asset ownership, the depreciation, and the long-term infrastructure returns. The arrangement closely mirrors what is now a standard template for frontier AI infrastructure deals in 2026: Apollo and Blackstone raising $36B to lease Google TPUs to Anthropic, Blackstone and Goldman Sachs inside Anthropic’s infrastructure JV, and CoreWeave’s $8.5B investment-grade GPU loan against its own rack stack.

The difference here is scale and geography. El Paso gives Meta lower land costs than the major Texas metro markets, proximity to established energy infrastructure corridors, and a workforce development narrative that is doing real political work.

Build Status and Employment

2,300 construction workers are already on site. Peak buildout is projected at 4,000 jobs during construction; 300 permanent operational positions once the campus is live. Meta has embedded the America’s Workforce Academy into the project — a free skilled trades training programme with a guaranteed job offer upon graduation at a Meta partner site. A $500,000 grant from Meta goes directly to El Paso public schools to fund STEM and skilled trades pathway programmes.

BlackRock is running a parallel workforce initiative through the BlackRock Foundation: Future Builders, a $30 million programme targeting training for 12,000 electricians over three years across Texas. The framing is explicitly tied to rising demand from energy infrastructure and data center buildout — which BlackRock’s own investment portfolio is generating. Funds that own data centers need electricians; the foundation trains them. It is less philanthropy than a vertically integrated labour supply chain.

Water Offset

The announcement highlights water restoration projects in El Paso. This is not decorative. El Paso is a water-constrained city — the Rio Grande is its primary source and has been under pressure from upstream depletion and drought — and large-scale data centers consume significant water for cooling. Water offset commitments are increasingly a non-negotiable for permit approvals and community relations in arid buildout zones. Meta faced similar requirements at its earlier Texas campuses.

What the Structure Says About AI Infrastructure

Meta’s balance sheet is not under pressure — the company generated $62.4B in free cash flow in 2025. The decision to cede 80% ownership to BlackRock anyway signals something about how hyperscalers are thinking about AI infrastructure at scale. Owning it all was the playbook when data center costs were measured in hundreds of millions. At $10B+ per campus, with dozens of campuses needed to sustain frontier model training and inference, the math changes. Bringing in institutional capital at the asset level keeps the investment off the capex line while the hyperscaler retains operational control and access guarantees.

Goldman Sachs recently estimated $130B in AI data centers were blocked in Q1 2026 by community opposition, permitting delays, and power grid constraints. El Paso represents a different bet — that a mid-size Texas city with lower opposition density, a willing utility, and a workforce development deal can deliver faster than a greenfield build in the constrained coastal markets.

For BlackRock, 80% of a $10B+ Meta data center is a trophy infrastructure asset with an anchor tenant that is not going to default. The returns are utility-like; the risk is negligible. That trade is exactly what institutional infrastructure funds are built for.