BlackRock is raising $12.3 billion in bonds to build a data center campus in El Paso, Texas, that will deliver roughly 1 gigawatt of power capacity. To put that in perspective, 1 gigawatt can power about 750,000 homes. Meta is the anchor tenant.
The financing is being orchestrated through a holding company called Project Sopaipilla Holdings, in which BlackRock controls an 80% stake and Meta holds the remaining 20%. JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley are running the bond sale.
Why the world’s biggest asset manager is building data centers
BlackRock recently completed a $40 billion acquisition of Aligned Data Centers, dramatically expanding its footprint in AI-related infrastructure. Its Global Infrastructure Partners unit and HPS Investment Partners are both involved in the Project Sopaipilla financing.
The playbook here is not new for Meta. The social media giant previously used an identical 80/20 joint venture structure with Blue Owl Capital for a data center project in Louisiana. The model allows Meta to secure necessary compute capacity for AI workloads while keeping the bulk of the capital expenditure off its own balance sheet.
The AI infrastructure arms race and what it means for crypto
By financing through traditional debt markets rather than any tokenized or crypto-native mechanism, BlackRock is signaling that for deals of this magnitude, the existing capital markets infrastructure remains the preferred path. This is notable given BlackRock’s own aggressive push into tokenized assets through its BUIDL fund and other initiatives.
For crypto-focused investors, projects like Render, Akash, and other decentralized compute protocols are trying to build distributed alternatives to exactly the kind of centralized facility BlackRock is financing. A $12 billion bond sale for a single data center underscores just how capital-intensive the centralized approach is.
BlackRock’s $40 billion Aligned Data Centers acquisition means the firm now controls a significant share of the infrastructure that AI companies depend on. That level of concentration in the hands of a single asset manager could draw regulatory scrutiny, particularly as governments worldwide grapple with questions about who controls the physical backbone of AI.