BlackRock flexed its muscle as one of the artificial intelligence data center boom’s most powerful players this week.
The investment giant executed roughly $57B in data center transactions by financing Meta’s massive Texas campus and closing its acquisition of Aligned Data Centers.
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BlackRock is leading a $12B debt sale to fund its data center project for Meta in El Paso, Texas, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley are expected to be the lead buyers of the debt and are reportedly looking for additional investors.
The El Paso campus, expected to have close to 1 gigawatt of capacity, is being developed through a joint venture in which BlackRock owns an 80% stake and Meta owns the remaining 20%.
The deal structure mirrors Meta’s joint venture with Blue Owl to build its data center megacampus in Richland Parish, Louisiana. That project was financed by $27B in debt for which BlackRock was one of the largest investors, acquiring more than $3B of the bonds.
BlackRock also announced this week that its subsidiary Global Infrastructure Partners and Emirati investment firm MGX closed on the $40B acquisition of data center provider Aligned. The companies said they will be investing an additional $5B in the Texas-based firm to accelerate the expansion of its data center footprint.
BlackRock and MGX, through a JV known as the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership, unveiled the deal to acquire Aligned from Macquarie Asset Management in October. Aligned operated 51 campuses, mostly in major U.S. markets, with more than 6.4 GW of operational and planned capacity.
Among Aligned’s planned projects is a campus in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, that Meta recently agreed to lease, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The world’s largest investment firm, BlackRock has entrenched itself as one of the heavyweights of hyperscale data center development. Its acquisition of GIP in 2024 gave BlackRock a data center investment and operations platform with more than $200B in global assets. BlackRock also acquired HPS Investment Partners, a major player in data center financing, in July 2025.
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