Meta and BlackRock fund a $14B AI data center in Texas
MetaThe venture gives Meta long-term capacity for AI workloads while BlackRock-managed funds take most of the ownership risk.
Meta and BlackRock are forming a venture to finance, develop and own a one-gigawatt data center campus in El Paso, Texas, with total development costs expected to reach about $14B.
The structure matters as much as the size. Meta says funds managed by BlackRock will own most of the venture, while Meta keeps a minority stake and leases the entire campus. That gives Meta dedicated AI infrastructure capacity without carrying the whole project directly on its own balance sheet.
For readers, the takeaway is that the AI race is increasingly a financing race. Frontier models need enormous compute, power and construction commitments, and the largest labs are turning data centers into institutional investment products.
This is not a new model launch, but it is a useful signal about where AI spending is going: bigger campuses, longer leases, and more partnerships between tech companies and capital managers.
Sources:
Anthropic
Hugging Face