On Monday, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley began pitching investors on a bond sale of at least $12 billion, as The Wall Street Journal reported. The money will build a Meta data centre in El Paso, Texas. The structure is the story.
Who owns what
BlackRock and its infrastructure and private-credit arms own 80% of the roughly one-gigawatt project. Meta, the company that will actually run AI inside it, owns just 20% and will lease the campus back. The debt sits with a BlackRock-controlled entity, not with Meta.
That keeps most of the cost off Meta’s books, booked as rent rather than capital spending. It is the same off-balance-sheet trick a Nikkei study just pinned at $1.65 trillion across the five biggest US tech firms.
Meta wrote the template
