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Meta's AI Data Center Financing

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.

The Texas and anchor sites

Site	Location	Structure	Scale	Status
Meta El Paso	El Paso County, TX	BlackRock (GIP + HPS) 80% / Meta 20%; Meta is developer, operator, sole tenant	~1 GW, 1,039 acres, $14.3B JV, $12.3B notes	Under construction (online 2028)
Meta Fort Worth	Tarrant County, TX	Meta-owned (on balance sheet)	Not disclosed	Operational, expanding
Meta Temple	Bell County, TX	Meta-owned	~$800M, ~900,000 sq ft	Under construction
Hyperion (blueprint)	Richland Parish, LA	Blue Owl 80% / Meta 20%; the template El Paso copied	Up to 5 GW, ~4,000 acres, ~$27B notes	Under construction

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

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

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

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.

Last updated September 11, 2026. Financing terms are from reporting on the El Paso and Hyperion bond deals; Hyperion is in Louisiana, included as the blueprint for the Texas structure. Status: El Paso under construction, online 2028.