Overview
- BlackRock began marketing about $12.3 billion in high‑grade bonds to fund a roughly 1 gigawatt AI data center campus in El Paso, Texas, with Meta signed as the anchor tenant.
- The deal is being offered through a holding company called Sopaipilla Investor in which BlackRock holds about an 80% stake and Meta holds about 20%.
- JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley are leading the syndication and the offering is structured as a single tranche maturing in 2048 with initial price talk near 2.875 percentage points over Treasuries.
- The transaction keeps most project debt off Meta’s corporate balance sheet by using an off‑balance‑sheet joint‑venture model that gives Meta access to capacity without funding the full build.
- The offering follows BlackRock’s expansion into data‑centre infrastructure after its Aligned Data Centers acquisition and will be watched as a gauge of institutional demand and for signs of concentration risk in AI physical infrastructure.