Topline<\/p>\n
BlackRock is set to take an 80% ownership stake in one of the biggest artificial intelligence data center campuses in the country\u2014Meta’s $14 billion, one gigawatt project in El Paso\u2014in one of the clearest signs yet that Wall Street is becoming a major financier of the AI race and signaling a new model for financing the accompanying infrastructure boom.<\/p>\n
A view of Meta’s data center in Ireland. <\/p>\n
PA Images via Getty ImagesKey Facts<\/p>\n
Meta and BlackRock on Tuesday announced<\/a> they were partnering to develop and operate the new, 1,000-acre data center campus in Texas that has been under construction for more than six months and will become one of the country\u2019s largest AI infrastructure projects. <\/p>\n The agreement says Meta will contribute land and in-progress construction assets worth about $2.3 billion and BlackRock will make a cash contribution of about $4.9 billion. <\/p>\n Meta will also receive a $1 billion distribution to align ownership and, in the end, will own only about 20% of the project while BlackRock-managed funds take an 80% ownership stake. <\/p>\n The deal represents a pioneering financing strategy that could reshape how Big Tech pays for increasingly expensive AI infrastructure, the bill for which has spooked investors<\/a> as capital expenditure forecasts at companies like Meta, Alphabet and other giants continue to grow.<\/p>\n What to watch for<\/p>\n Meta will report its second quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday. The company’s shares dropped about 10%, erasing about $175 billion from its market capitalization in a single day, after a first quarter earnings report included a higher 2026 capital expenditure forecast than previously estimated. Chief Financial Officer Susan Li attributed the increase to higher memory-chip pricing and additional data center costs tied to AI infrastructure.<\/p>\n Investment Firms Are Backing Big Tech’s AI Dreams <\/p>\n Meta has gone all in on using financial firms to back its data centers. The company in October announced a similar deal<\/a> with Blue Owl Capital to develop, own and finance the record-breaking Hyperion AI data center campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana. The deal created a special-purpose holding company called Beignet Investor to issue about $27 billion in project bonds to fund construction, and Blue Owl funds directly invested about $3 billion in exchange for an 80% ownership stake in the project. Other tech companies are also partnering with financial firms, but in different ways. OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX last year formed a new company, Stargate<\/a> LLC, to develop AI data centers across the U.S., with an initial goal of investing $100 billion and eventually up to $500 billion. Unlike the Meta projects however, the tech companies and investors are co-owners of the platform. Google and Blackstone created a new joint venture<\/a> to build a new AI-focused cloud business; Microsoft, BlackRock and state-backed Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX created a new fund structure<\/a> that allows institutional investors to finance new AI infrastructure; and Broadcom recently partnered with Apollo and Blackstone to create an AI infrastructure platform<\/a> targeting more than 20 gigawatts of AI compute deployments. <\/p>\n BIG NUMBER<\/p>\n More than 700. That\u2019s how many data centers are actively under construction across 38 U.S. states, according to Texas-based energy marketplace consulting company Electric Choice<\/a>. Existing data centers are overwhelmingly concentrated in Virginia and Texas. <\/p>\n further readingForbesClean Energy Tech Deals Are Booming\u2014Powered By Data CentersBy Alan Ohnsman<\/a>ForbesNew York Halts Large Data Centers Being Built For A YearBy Siladitya Ray<\/a>ForbesAI Data Centers Are Set To Electrify This $13 Billion Family\u2019s 76-Year-Old CompanyBy Simone Melvin<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Topline BlackRock is set to take an 80% ownership stake in one of the biggest artificial intelligence data…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389146,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[4267,24238,5421,138,140,139,5403,27],"class_list":["post-389145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-el-paso","tag-ai","tag-blackrock","tag-data-center","tag-el-paso","tag-el-paso-headlines","tag-el-paso-news","tag-meta","tag-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389145","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=389145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}