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BlackRock Seeks More Than $12 Billion in Bonds to Back Meta El Paso Data Center

The sale reflects a rising use of joint‑venture bond financing to fund large AI data centers and could push further demand into credit markets.

Overview

  • BlackRock is marketing over $12 billion of bonds issued by a holding company tied to its 80% stake in Project Sopaipilla, with Meta owning the remaining 20%, and banks have scheduled investor calls ahead of expected pricing next week.
  • The financing would help build an El Paso campus targeting roughly 1 gigawatt of compute capacity that the reports say aims to be online in 2028 and support more than 300 on‑site jobs.
  • The deal follows an 80/20 joint‑venture template that lets Meta keep project debt off its corporate balance sheet, a structure used previously in Louisiana for a separate Meta campus.
  • BlackRock has been a major player in recent data‑center finance deals, buying more than $3 billion of a prior $27 billion private‑debt package for Meta’s Hyperion program and closing acquisitions that expand its data‑center platform.
  • Market analysts see the transaction as part of a broader wave of AI infrastructure funding that could sustain large debt issuance as tech firms scale compute capacity through the rest of the decade.