BlackRock leads at least $12 billion debt financing to support Meta's large data center project in Texas

TechFlow reports on July 21 that, according to The Wall Street Journal citing sources familiar with the matter, BlackRock is leading a debt financing of at least $12 billion to fund its joint data center project in El Paso, Texas, co-supported with Meta Platforms.

Sources stated that BlackRock and its infrastructure and private credit business units hold an 80% equity stake in the data center project, while Meta Platforms, which will utilize the facility, holds the remaining 20%. The campus is expected to have approximately 1 gigawatt of computing capacity.

Sources added that JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley are leading the underwriting of the large-scale debt issuance and are engaging with other potential investors. Over the past year, BlackRock has continued to partner with AI hyperscale cloud providers, investing tens of billions of dollars into data centers, including a $40 billion acquisition of Aligned Data Centers.

Sources also noted that Meta recently agreed to lease an Aligned Data Centers facility currently under construction in Shippingport, Pennsylvania.