Meta to build $14B El Paso data center campus with BlackRock

Meta Platforms Inc. today announced plans to build an artificial intelligence data center campus in El Paso, Texas.

The project is a collaboration with BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager. The two companies plan to invest $14 billion in the campus.

Meta and BlackRock expect to finalize their joint venture agreement in the coming days. Upon signing, the Facebook parent will contribute $2.3 billion worth of physical assets including on-site facilities that are currently under construction. BlackRock, in turn, will invest $4.9 billion. The asset management also intends to make a $1 billion payment to Meta.

BlackRock is set to receive a 80% stake in the campus while the social networking giant will own the remaining 20%. Meta will be the site’s sole user when it comes online in 2028. According to the Facebook parent, its lease has a four-year initial term that can be optionally renewed four times.

Meta stated that the initiative’s $14 billion budget covers “total development costs for the buildings” along with power, cooling and networking expenses. Notably, the company didn’t mention the cost of the chips that the campus will host, which suggests the total project price could be higher. Earlier this month, Meta announced plans to spend more than $50 billion on a data center campus in Louisiana. Bloomberg reported that the price tag will be $250 billion when taking into account chips and certain related items.

The Louisiana project has a similar financial structure as Meta’s El Paso development. Last year, the company sold an 80% stake in the former campus to Blue Owl Capital. In return, the investment firm made a $7 billion cash contribution to the project.

Meta expects its El Paso campus to provide 1 gigawatt of AI-optimized computing capacity. The site joins a string of 1-gigawatt data center projects that the company has announced over the past two years. Those campuses are located in Ohio, Indiana and Canada.

Meta expects its three other 1-gigawatt sites to cost around $10 billion. The fact that the El Paso site has a $14 billion budget hints the company may be planning to use a different, more advanced data center design. It’s also possible that Meta will use the campus to power the cloud infrastructure business it’s reportedly building.

The Facebook parent ended  2055 with $72 billion in capital expenses. Meta expects that number to range between $125 billion and $145 billion this year. The cloud business that Meta is believed to be building could ease its efforts to realize a return on investment. Meta already sells access to Muse Spark 1.1, its newest AI model, via an application programming interface that enables other companies to integrate it into their applications.

Photo: Meta