BlackRock takes 80% of a $14bn Meta data centre — and pension funds are the buyer
Meta and BlackRock formed a venture to build a 1-gigawatt campus in El Paso. BlackRock-managed funds hold 80%, Meta 20%. Meta contributes about $2.3bn of land and partially built assets; BlackRock puts in roughly $4.9bn cash, with about $12.5bn of debt financing behind it.
The structure is the story. Meta is building a gigawatt of compute it will be the sole occupant of, and owning one fifth of it. The other four fifths belong to funds whose ultimate beneficiaries are pension holders — which is how hyperscaler data centres become an institutional asset class rather than a line on a tech company's balance sheet.
The mechanics: total development cost around $14bn, BlackRock funds at 80% and Meta at 20%, Meta contributing roughly $2.3bn in land and partially built construction assets, BlackRock contributing about $4.9bn in cash, and roughly $12.5bn of debt behind the position. Completion is expected in 2028, with more than 4,000 construction jobs at peak and about 300 operational roles after.
Why do it this way rather than build on balance sheet? Because capex of this scale competes with everything else a company wants to fund, and because a single tenant with a long lease is exactly the risk profile institutional infrastructure money is built to hold. BlackRock has spent 2026 assembling a dedicated AI infrastructure arm for precisely this trade.
The consequence is that the AI buildout has acquired a much broader set of stakeholders, most of whom did not choose the exposure. When the sector's economics are a public argument, the answer to "who is holding the risk" is no longer confined to a handful of tech balance sheets — and global capacity is projected to roughly double to about 200GW by 2030 on as much as $3tn of spending.
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