BlackRock Preps $12B+ Bond Sale for Meta's El Paso Campus

Bloomberg reported that BlackRock is preparing to sell more than $12 billion of bonds through a holding company that owns 80% of Meta's El Paso, Texas data center campus, with Meta keeping the remaining 20%. JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley are running fixed-income investor calls this Wednesday, and pricing is expected early next week.

The vehicle is called Sopaipilla Holdings, a sibling in spirit to the Louisiana joint venture that Meta named Beignet, where Blue Owl Capital owns 80% and Meta owns 20% of a bigger campus called Hyperion. The El Paso build is gigawatt-sized, is expected to come online in 2028, and Meta is spending more than $10 billion on it. BlackRock's slice of Sopaipilla runs through Global Infrastructure Partners and HPS Investment Partners, the two private-markets shops CEO Larry Fink bought for $12.5 billion and $12 billion respectively.

The structure is the story here, not the dollar figure. If a hyperscaler can push the majority of a single-site AI build off its own balance sheet and into a private-credit vehicle backed by long-dated bonds, the ceiling on how much capex any one company can absorb goes up a lot. It also gives institutional investors a way to buy AI infrastructure exposure that looks more like project-finance debt than tech equity, which is a different risk profile than owning Meta stock.

The honest caveat is that the reporting so far is thin on the El Paso bond's tenor, rating, and coupon. The comparable Beignet deal in Louisiana priced with a 2049 maturity and an A+ rating from S&P, but do not assume the El Paso paper lands in the same place until it prices. What the reporting does not give you is who ends up holding this debt, or how much of the demand depends on Meta's implicit credit rather than the standalone economics of the campus.

If it clears cleanly, the winners are the firms selling this playbook: BlackRock's GIP and HPS units, Blue Owl on the Louisiana precedent, and every hyperscaler that would rather finance the next gigawatt through an SPV than through its own bond desk.