Meta Platforms and BlackRock announced a joint venture on July 28, 2026, to develop and own a roughly $14 billion AI-focused data center campus in Northeast El Paso, El Paso County, Texas. The deal was first reported by CNBC and confirmed by a Meta investor relations press release, with additional local coverage from the El Paso Times and El Paso Matters.

The venture covers approximately 1,000 acres in Northeast El Paso and is already under construction, with aerial imagery confirming active build-out as of August 2026. The campus is designed for roughly 1 gigawatt of compute capacity, making it one of the largest single AI infrastructure commitments announced in the United States.

Meta contributes the land and in-progress construction assets; BlackRock-managed funds contribute the cash and raise the project debt. Meta will serve as construction manager and property manager, then lease back the campus capacity as its initial sole occupant.

Meta Platforms is the parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and has been accelerating its AI infrastructure investment at a pace few hyperscalers can match. BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager and has been expanding its infrastructure and private credit platforms aggressively, making large-scale real-asset financing a core growth area. The El Paso joint venture is a signal of how hyperscalers are increasingly turning to institutional capital to fund infrastructure at a scale that strains even their own balance sheets.

Meta is effectively monetizing assets it built, handing 80% of the equity to BlackRock, and then leasing the capacity back under a four-year initial term with extension options covering the full 1-GW campus. It books future payments as rent rather than carrying the entire construction cost on its balance sheet. BlackRock raises roughly $12.5 billion in project debt against a hard-asset campus with a creditworthy anchor tenant locked in from day one. This is infrastructure finance logic applied to AI compute, and it is a template other hyperscalers are likely watching closely.

Reports already describe thousands of workers on site during the current construction phase, drawing from El Paso's building trades, West Texas contractors, and the broader bi-national workforce spanning the Juárez maquila ecosystem. That pool has deep experience in large-scale electrical, mechanical, and civil work from decades of industrial, logistics, and defense-adjacent projects in the region. Construction phase demand will likely pull from El Paso and southern New Mexico first, supplemented by regional union and non-union contractors experienced in remote industrial builds. Albuquerque is the nearest comparable U.S. metro, several hundred miles away, so most trades will travel from within the West Texas and southern New Mexico corridor.

The critical gap comes after the cranes leave. El Paso has limited depth in hyperscale data center operations talent, including critical facility technicians, electrical and mechanical systems specialists, and data center infrastructure managers. The most realistic path to staffing the operations phase combines imported specialists from established data center markets with structured upskilling of local industrial workers into long-term technical roles. Firms that build those pipelines now, before 2028 capacity comes online, will have a meaningful advantage. For a full breakdown of roles, pay bands, and where the talent is coming from, see our guide to hiring data center talent in El Paso County. Sources: CNBC, which first reported the announcement, and the Meta investor relations press release, El Paso Times, El Paso Matters, The Los Angeles Times, and The Next Web.