Meta secures $13 billion financing for El Paso AI data centre, setting new record for single-site deal

Meta is raising $13bn for one Texas data centre, a new ceiling for single-site AI financings

Bloomberg reports Meta is working with Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan on a roughly $13bn financing package for its El Paso AI data centre, mostly debt. The scaffolding around AI infrastructure keeps growing. The financing scaffolding around AI infrastructure keeps growing. Bloomberg reported on Sunday that Meta Platforms is working with Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase on a financing package of roughly $13bn for a single data centre in El Paso, Texas. If completed at the size discussed, it would be one of the largest single-site digital-infrastructure financings ever assembled. The package is expected to be mostly debt, with a smaller equity portion, according to Cryptopolitan's coverage of the financing. Meta has been increasing the scope of the El Paso project on a near-quarterly cadence: the company more than sextupled its planned investment in the site in March, lifting it past $10bn, and is now targeting roughly 1 gigawatt of capacity ahead of an opening planned for 2028. The new $13bn financing package extends that scaling. Project-level financing of this kind is now the standard structural answer for AI data centres at scale. TNW reported last week on Blackstone's $1.75bn IPO of a publicly listed data-centre REIT designed to give public-market investors a route into the same infrastructure trade. Earlier this year TNW also covered Oracle's $16.3bn Stargate-related financing, in which Pimco anchored the debt after some US banks reportedly retreated from the size. The Meta El Paso deal sits inside that pattern, but pushes single-site financing to a new ceiling. The wider corporate logic is straightforward. Meta's 2026 capex guidance is now between $125bn and $145bn, a step-change from any historical baseline. Funding that level of capacity from operating cash flow alone would compress free-cash-flow generation in ways that public markets, even in their current AI-friendly mood, would not absorb without complaint. Project-level debt structured against contracted capacity, leased to a creditworthy operator (Meta itself), and amortised over decades is the cleaner answer. The Meta El Paso package, by its sheer size, is also a credit-market signal. Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are not arranging $13bn into a market with thin appetite. The fact that the package is expected to clear at this size, against a single counterparty's lease, suggests that institutional credit demand for AI-infrastructure paper remains broad enough to absorb deals of this scale. Whether that absorption capacity persists if AI capex moderates, or if the underlying lease rates compress, is a question that will be visible only in retrospect. For now, the take-away is simpler. AI infrastructure has, in 2026, become a category of project finance at the scale of national infrastructure projects. The $13bn for one El Paso facility is being assembled the way pipelines and ports used to be. The cash flows are advertised. The lease is creditworthy. The lenders are showing up.

Meta picks Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan for El Paso data center financing, source says

May 4 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms is working with Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase on a roughly $13 billion financing package for a data center in El Paso, Texas, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Monday. Bloomberg News, which first reported the news, said a majority of the financing is expected to be in the form of debt, with the rest in equity. Big Tech firms are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers amid strong demand for the technology, and departing from their long-standing reluctance to raise debt to gain an edge in the artificial intelligence race. Meta, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment outside regular business hours. Meta in March boosted its investment in the planned El Paso AI data center by more than sixfold to $10 billion, as it aims to reach 1 gigawatt of capacity ahead of the facility's projected 2028 opening. Meta and its rivals Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft are projected to spend over $630 billion on AI infrastructure this year. (Reporting by Milani Vinn in New York, Mihika Sharma in Bengaluru, Carlos Mendez in Mexico City; Editing by Rashmi Aich)