BlackRock markets $12.3B bonds for Meta's 1-gigawatt El Paso data center
In brief
- BlackRock markets $12.3 billion in bonds for 1-gigawatt El Paso data center campus
- Meta anchors project via 80/20 joint venture, holding 20% stake through Project Sopaipilla Holdings
- JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley manage the bond sale
- Structure mirrors Meta's prior 80/20 Louisiana data center deal with Blue Owl Capital
The Deal Structure
JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley are running the bond sale. The financing arrangement reflects BlackRock's broader pivot into infrastructure ownership — the firm recently completed a $40 billion acquisition of Aligned Data Centers, positioning itself as a major player in the compute capacity that AI companies depend on.
BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners unit and HPS Investment Partners are both involved in the Project Sopaipilla financing. The structure itself is not novel. Meta previously used an identical 80/20 joint venture structure with Blue Owl Capital for a data center project in Louisiana, signaling that this model has become Meta's standard approach to large-scale infrastructure deployment.
Why the 80/20 Split Matters
The model allows Meta to secure necessary compute capacity for AI workloads while keeping the bulk of the capital expenditure off its own balance sheet. For Meta, this is capital-efficient. The company gets the compute it needs without loading its own debt. For BlackRock, it's a stable, long-term revenue stream backed by a creditworthy anchor tenant.
By financing through traditional debt markets rather than any tokenized or crypto-native mechanism, BlackRock is tapping the institutional bond market — a signal that data center infrastructure has become a mainstream asset class. One gigawatt of power capacity can power about 750,000 homes, underscoring the scale of computational demand driving these deals.
