BlackRock

By Mary Whitfill Roeloffs , Forbes Staff. BlackRock is set to take an 80% ownership stake in one of the biggest artificial intelligence data center campuses in the country—Meta's $14 billion, one gigawatt project in El Paso—in 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. Meta and BlackRock on Tuesday announced 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’s largest AI infrastructure projects.

9 billion. 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. 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 as capital expenditure forecasts at companies like Meta, Alphabet and other giants continue to grow. 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. Meta has gone all in on using financial firms to back its data centers. The company in October announced a similar deal 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. , with an initial goal of investing $100 billion and eventually up to $500 billion.