Meta's AI Data Center Financing

El Paso · Fort Worth · Temple · the Hyperion blueprint

Meta has the strongest balance sheet of any frontier AI builder, and it is the one most aggressively moving data center debt off that balance sheet. Its largest AI campuses are engineered so that Meta does not own them: an asset manager owns 80%, Meta holds 20% and leases the campus back, and tens of billions in construction debt sit with the venture rather than with Meta. The El Paso campus is the Texas instance; the Louisiana Hyperion campus is the blueprint it copied.

  • On-site gas
  • Co-located renewables
  • Nuclear
  • Grid
Map of Meta data center sites in Texas, with other companies dimmed OpenAI: Stargate Shackelford, 2,000 MW Microsoft: Microsoft Pecos (Project Kilby), 2,000 MW OpenAI: Stargate Abilene, 1,200 MW OpenAI: Stargate Milam, 1,200 MW AWS: AWS Comanche Peak (Project Spectrum), 1,200 MW Microsoft: Microsoft Abilene (Crusoe), 900 MW Google: Meitner Energy Center, 840 MW Anthropic: Hut 8 Beacon Point, 704 MW Anthropic: Nexus Hubbard, 500 MW Anthropic: Barber Lake, 207 MW Anthropic: Riot Rockdale, 191 MW Anthropic: Abernathy, 168 MW Anthropic: Cedar Creek, capacity not disclosed AWS: AWS Project Eagle, capacity not disclosed AWS: AWS GW Ranch, capacity not disclosed AWS: AWS Cedar Creek, capacity not disclosed AWS: AWS Round Rock, capacity not disclosed AWS: AWS San Antonio (Rockfish, Bitter Blue), capacity not disclosed AWS: AWS Floydada (Horizon Junction), capacity not disclosed Google: Google Midlothian, capacity not disclosed Google: Google Red Oak, capacity not disclosed Google: Google Haskell County, capacity not disclosed Google: Google Armstrong County, capacity not disclosed Google: Google Wilbarger County, capacity not disclosed Microsoft: Microsoft Castroville, capacity not disclosed Anthropic: Waco campus, capacity not disclosed Meta: Meta El Paso, 1,000 MW Meta: Meta Temple, 198 MW Meta: Meta Fort Worth, capacity not disclosed AUSTIN ABILENE EL PASO
Sites
3
Disclosed capacity
1.2 GW
Live AI capacity
None disclosed
Most common power
Grid
Ownership
Owned and off-balance JV
Sector
Data centers

The sites

Meta Sites in Texas

Each bar is one site, colored by power source and filled by status. Select a bar to find its row.

Operational   Under construction   Planned, leased or filed   Capacity not disclosed

3 sites
FacilityLocationPower sourceChipsStatusCapacity (MW)
Meta El PasoEl Paso, El Paso CountyOn-site gasNvidia GPUs / Meta MTIAUnder Construction1,000
Meta Fort WorthFort Worth, Tarrant CountyGridNvidia GPUs / Meta MTIAOperational (expanding)-
Meta TempleTemple, Bell CountyGridNvidia GPUs / Meta MTIAUnder Construction198

Meta El Paso is the company's 29th data center and its largest Texas commitment. Ground was broken in October 2025 at $1.5B and 1.2M sq ft; in March 2026 that was raised to $10B and 1 GW by 2028. The power arrangement is the notable part: El Paso Electric grid supply plus 813 modular natural gas generators totaling 366 MW, at a cost of $473M. A BlackRock strategic venture now develops the campus, with Meta as construction manager and initial sole occupant. Meta has separately contracted more than 5,000 MW of clean power to the Texas grid.

Meta Fort Worth has operated since 2017 and has been expanded repeatedly. Meta does not disclose its capacity.

Meta Temple is roughly $800M across about 900,000 sq ft in Bell County, targeting late 2027.

Hyperion, the blueprint. Richland Parish, Louisiana: Blue Owl 80% and Meta 20%, up to 5 GW on about 4,000 acres, about $27B in notes. Not in Texas, so not on the map or in the table.

The structure

The Off-Balance-Sheet Structure

The move is the same in Louisiana and Texas: Meta forms a joint venture with a private-capital firm that takes the majority stake and carries the equity risk, the venture raises long-dated bonds to fund construction, and Meta becomes the campus's tenant rather than its owner. Meta supplies the demand, the construction management, and the credit guarantee; the asset manager supplies the balance sheet. The debt lands on the venture, not on Meta.

At El Paso, the venture is Project Sopaipilla Holdings. Funds run by BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners and HPS Investment Partners hold 80%; Meta holds 20% and leases the whole roughly 1 GW campus back as sole tenant. The $14.3 billion JV is funded partly by Meta's ~$2.3 billion in land and construction-in-progress, BlackRock's ~$4.9 billion in cash, and about $12.3 billion in senior secured notes rated A+ by S&P and AA-(expected) by Fitch. Meta even took a one-time $1 billion ownership-alignment distribution to true up the 80/20 split.

Hyperion in Louisiana is the template. There, Blue Owl Capital owns 80% of the venture (through an SPV named Beignet) and Meta 20%, and the entity sold roughly $27 billion in senior secured notes - the largest private-debt offering on record - of which BlackRock's own funds bought more than $3 billion. Hyperion is not in Texas, but it is the biggest and clearest instance of the structure the Texas deal replicates, which is why it anchors this page.

Why Meta does this

Why Meta Does This

The structure reduces the capital-expenditure burden of the AI buildout without giving up control. Meta keeps operational command - it designs, builds, and runs the campus and is its only tenant - while the reported debt sits off its books and a private-capital partner absorbs the equity risk. It lets Meta build multi-gigawatt capacity faster than pure capex would allow, and it brings the same private-credit giants financing the rest of the AI buildout - Blue Owl, BlackRock, PIMCO - directly into Meta's infrastructure.

It also connects Meta to the wider financing web. Blue Owl is the same firm backing Crusoe's equity at Stargate Abilene; BlackRock appears on both sides of Meta's own deals. The off-balance-sheet model is not a Meta quirk - it is how hyperscale AI capacity is increasingly financed, and Meta is its most aggressive practitioner.

The open question

The Open Question

Every off-balance-sheet AI deal carries the same risk, and analysts have pressed Meta on it directly. The bonds are long-dated - El Paso's power deal runs to 2048, Hyperion's notes mature in 2049 - but the accelerators inside the buildings depreciate in a handful of years, and the leases anchoring the debt reportedly run shorter than the campuses they finance. Meta's stated defense is that the four-year lease cycles let it re-evaluate its compute needs as hardware turns over. Whether decades-long debt against fast-depreciating chips holds up is the question the structure has not yet had to answer.

What runs here

What Runs Here

These are Meta first-party campuses - Meta is the sole tenant at El Paso and the operator everywhere - running Meta's own AI training and inference on Nvidia GPUs and Meta's MTIA silicon. There is no external lab; the financing is split, but the compute is Meta's. As with every hyperscaler, Meta does not disclose which models or runs execute at which site. El Paso also pairs its grid supply with 813 on-site gas generators (366 MW), a behind-the-meter hedge against interconnection delay.

Record

Dataset Record

Dataset
Meta rows of the Texas frontier compute dataset (llm_data_centers2026)
Sites
3
Map
Meta sites highlighted; other companies dimmed
Last verified
Q4 2026