Meta is partnering with U.S. asset manager BlackRock to set up a joint venture to jointly develop and own a mega AI data centre campus under construction in El Paso, Texas. It is moving away from directly owning facilities with its own funds and stepping up a new investment model that secures infrastructure using external capital.

Japan’s ITmedia reported on Tuesday that Meta and BlackRock are pushing to establish a joint venture to jointly develop and own the El Paso, Texas, data centre campus. The deal is expected to be wrapped up within days.

The joint venture will jointly bear total data centre development costs of $14 billion. A fund managed by BlackRock will hold an 80 percent stake, and Meta 20 percent. Meta will contribute about $2.3 billion worth of land and assets under construction in kind at closing, while BlackRock will invest about $4.9 billion in cash. Meta will receive a one-off distribution of about $1 billion to maintain its stake ratio. Part of BlackRock’s investment is expected to be funded through $12.5 billion in debt financing.

Meta will lease the entire data centre owned by the joint venture on a long-term basis. The initial lease term is 4 years, and extension options would allow use for up to 20 years. Meta will also provide a residual value guarantee of up to $13 billion.

Meta will operate the facility directly. It will also oversee construction management and operations after completion, and is expected to remain the data centre’s sole tenant for the time being.

The project has also been expanded significantly from earlier plans. When Meta first announced the El Paso data centre construction plan in October 2025, it cited about 1.2 million square feet of total floor area, investment of more than $1.5 billion, about 100 operations staff, up to 1,800 construction workers and power supply capacity of up to 1 gigawatt.

Under the latest plan, the campus has been finalised at 1 gigawatt of AI computing capacity, and Meta’s investment has expanded to more than $10 billion. Construction staffing has increased to as many as 4,000 people, while operations staffing has risen to 300. More than 2,300 people have already been deployed at the construction site, and the start of operations is expected in 2028.

The key to the deal is a change in funding. Instead of directly owning the data centre as before, Meta chose a structure in which outside investors hold most of the equity and it leases the facility long term. The company described this as part of its “Meta Compute” strategy and said it would diversify funding sources for AI infrastructure investment. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg (마크 저커버그) said cooperation with BlackRock meant it had become possible to “build AI infrastructure faster and at larger scale”.

BlackRock’s selection was also reported to have been decided through a competitive process rather than simply attracting a financial investor. Meta’s strategy is interpreted as seeking to reduce the burden of directly reflecting massive capital expenditure on its financial statements while increasing the pace of expanding AI computing infrastructure.

The deal is an extension of Meta’s AI data centre investment strategy. Meta also set up a joint venture last October with a fund managed by Blue Owl Capital to develop the Hyperion data centre. The El Paso project is meaningful in that it further expands an AI infrastructure investment model that uses external capital.

The industry is focusing on the possibility that Meta could apply the same structure to other AI data centre projects in the future. Analysts say a model in which ownership is shared with outside investors while control over facility operations and computing resources is retained directly could become a new standard for expanding AI infrastructure.