Meta has acquired about 1,039 acres in El Paso for a campus planned to scale to 1 gigawatt, with a dedicated natural gas plant proposed alongside BlackRock-backed financing.
BlackRock is raising $12.3 billion in bonds to finance a data center campus in El Paso, Texas, with Meta as anchor tenant and planned power capacity of roughly 1 gigawatt. The project is being financed through Project Sopaipilla Holdings, in which BlackRock controls 80% and Meta owns 20%, with JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley leading the bond sale. Meta has separately acquired roughly 1,039 acres in Northeast El Paso for about $8.5 million, or around $8,156 per acre, for a campus whose projected investment has expanded from an initial $1.5 billion disclosed in 2024 to more than $10 billion. The site is designed around scalable 1 gigawatt infrastructure, and Meta has proposed a dedicated 366 megawatt natural gas power plant for the facility with estimated costs of $473 million to $551.8 million. Groundbreaking is slated for October 2025, with active construction expected in 2026. The build-out is projected to create about 1,800 construction jobs and around 100 permanent positions once the campus is operational. The project would mark Meta’s third Texas presence after Fort Worth and Temple. The development adds to BlackRock’s broader push into AI infrastructure following its $40 billion acquisition of Aligned Data Centers, while also underscoring mounting competition for land and power in Texas. For crypto markets, that matters because Bitcoin miners and AI data centers are increasingly competing for the same low-cost electricity, large sites and grid access, which could raise pressure on mining economics in power-constrained regions.