July 28 (Reuters) – Meta Platforms and the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock on Tuesday announced a venture to develop and operate a data center campus \u200cin El Paso, Texas, a project that would cost about $14 billion in \u200cdevelopment. <\/p>\n
The race to build out AI infrastructure has prompted tech giants to turn to debt sales worth tens \u200bof billions of dollars or seek external capital from fund managers such as BlackRock due to an unprecedented scale of investment. <\/p>\n
Meta said BlackRock-managed funds will take an 80% ownership stake in the venture, with Meta retaining the remaining 20%. A portion of BlackRock’s investment will \u200cbe financed through $12.5 billion in \u2060debt. Meta will also receive a $1 billion distribution to align ownership. <\/p>\n
Meta will contribute land and in-progress construction assets worth about $2.3 billion, while \u2060BlackRock will make a cash contribution of about $4.9 billion, the company said. <\/p>\n
The Facebook-parent earlier said it was building an over $10 billion data center project in El Paso, near the Texas-New Mexico \u200bborder, among \u200b28 data centers it has in either \u200boperation or under construction in the \u200cU.S. <\/p>\n
The data center campus, already under construction, is designed to provide 1 gigawatt of compute capacity, essential for Meta’s AI technologies and supporting its core business. Operations are expected to commence in 2028. <\/p>\n
Meta has said it plans to invest $600 billion to build data centers by 2028, with an aim to fast-track work on personal superintelligence, which could help \u200cspin up new cash flows from the Meta \u200bAI app, image-to-video ad tools and smart glasses. <\/p>\n
The social \u200bmedia giant is building several \u200bgigawatt-scale data centers across the U.S., including one in rural Louisiana, a \u200cproject Meta expected to expand to \u200b5 gigawatts of compute \u200bcapacity, with investment increasing to more than $50 billion. <\/p>\n
Shares of Meta had fallen about 10% so far this year, as investors are scrutinizing costs of AI expansion. \u200bThe company is scheduled to \u200creport second-quarter results on July 29. <\/p>\n
Morgan Stanley & Co and J.P. Morgan Securities served \u200bas financial advisors to Meta in connection with this transaction. <\/p>\n
(Reporting by Jaspreet \u200bSingh in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"July 28 (Reuters) – Meta Platforms and the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock on Tuesday announced a venture…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":388935,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[24238,5421,138,140,139,5659,137048,27],"class_list":["post-388934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-el-paso","tag-blackrock","tag-data-center","tag-el-paso","tag-el-paso-headlines","tag-el-paso-news","tag-meta-platforms","tag-project-meta","tag-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/388935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}