Whose money is in the gigawatt
Meta will occupy all of a $14bn data centre and own a fifth of it. The other four fifths belong to funds whose beneficiaries never opted into the AI trade.
BlackRock-managed funds hold 80% of the El Paso venture, Meta 20% — about $2.3bn of land and part-built assets from Meta, roughly $4.9bn cash from BlackRock, and around $12.5bn of debt behind it.
Why not just build it
Because capex at this scale competes with everything else, and because a single creditworthy tenant on a long lease is the exact risk profile institutional infrastructure capital is designed to hold. Meta gets the gigawatt without the balance sheet; BlackRock gets a bond-like asset with a technology yield.
It is a sensible trade for both parties. It is also how a new asset class gets created — BlackRock spent 2026 building a dedicated AI infrastructure arm for precisely this.
The consequence nobody signed for
Pension beneficiaries are now exposed to AI infrastructure returns. Not because they formed a view on whether inference demand justifies a gigawatt in El Paso, but because that exposure is inside a diversified infrastructure allocation.
When the AI capex debate gets loud, the answer to "who holds the risk" is no longer a handful of tech balance sheets.
Capacity is the constraint, and capital is getting creative
Global capacity is projected to roughly double to around 200GW by 2030 on as much as $3tn of spending. That is why factory-built floating data centres are being engineered — a moored 50MW unit routes around land acquisition, permitting, interconnection queues and water rights all at once.
Those four are the actual bottleneck, and none of them is a technology problem. When the constraint is siting, capital goes looking for sites nobody else bid on — including offshore.
Meta — Meta Announces New Strategic Venture with BlackRock to Develop Data Center in El Paso → · CNBC — Meta, BlackRock partner on $14 billion El Paso data center venture → · BloombergNEF — AI Data Center Build Advances at Full Speed →