July 28 (Reuters) \u2013 Meta Platforms and the world\u2019s largest asset manager BlackRock on Tuesday announced a venture to develop and operate a data center campus in El Paso, Texas, a project \u200bthat would cost about $14 billion in development.<\/p>\n
The race to build \u200cout AI infrastructure has prompted tech giants to turn to debt sales worth tens of 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 \u200c80% ownership \u200bstake in the venture, with Meta retaining \u2060the remaining 20%. A portion \u2060of BlackRock\u2019s investment will be financed through $12.5 billion in debt. 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 BlackRock will make \u200ba 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 \u2060El Paso, near the Texas-New Mexico border, \u2060among 28 data centers it has in either operation \u200bor under construction in the U.S.<\/p>\n
The data center campus, already under construction, is \u200bdesigned to provide 1 gigawatt of compute capacity, essential for \u200cMeta\u2019s 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 \u2060superintelligence, which could help spin up new cash flows from the Meta AI app, image-to-video ad tools and smart glasses.<\/p>\n
The social media giant is building \u2060several gigawatt-scale data centers \u200cacross the U.S., including one in rural Louisiana, \u2060a project Meta expected to expand to 5 gigawatts \u200bof compute \u200ccapacity, with investment increasing to more than $50 billion.<\/p>\n
Shares \u200bof Meta \u2060had fallen about 10% so far this year, as investors are scrutinizing costs of AI expansion. The company is scheduled to report second-quarter results on July 29.<\/p>\n
Morgan Stanley & Co and J.P. Morgan Securities served as financial advisors to Meta in connection with this transaction.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing \u200bby Devika Syamnath)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"July 28 (Reuters) \u2013 Meta Platforms and the world\u2019s largest asset manager BlackRock on Tuesday announced a venture…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":388953,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[138,140,139],"class_list":["post-388952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-el-paso","tag-el-paso","tag-el-paso-headlines","tag-el-paso-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388952","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=388952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/388953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}