Meta is working with Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan on nearly $13 billion in financing for its El Paso data center campus, according to a May 4 report. The package is mostly debt with a smaller slice of equity. It could become one of the largest single-site digital infrastructure financings ever, though it falls short of Meta’s $27 billion Hyperion deal with Blue Owl in October 2025.
Meta’s original commitment to El Paso, announced in October 2025, was $1.5 billion. The funding under discussion is now nearly eight times that amount, increasing the campus’s capacity to about one gigawatt.
The EL Paso deal moves data centers out of real estate financing
A campus of this size has outgrown traditional commercial real estate debt. Citigroup estimates that building the broader data center could require $3 trillion by 2030.
“If you can’t invest a billion dollars, we don’t even want to talk to you,” says Adam Lewis, managing director at Citizens and head of the 35-person digital infrastructure business. He said. “We can read electrical blueprints and mechanical blueprints and understand land use permits and energy configurations.”
Scott Wilcoxon, global head of digital infrastructure investment banking at JPMorgan, focused on what he calls “time to power” as the biggest barrier to the industry.
The El Paso deal is in the same bracket as Hyperion, but the structure is different. As mentioned by CryptopolitanHyperion was a joint venture, with Blue Owl owning 80 percent and Meta owning 20 percent through a SPV that raised $27 billion in bonds. El Paso is mostly direct debt, with Meta retaining more direct ownership.
Standard & Poor’s calls the hyperscale “concentrated risk.”
S&P Global Ratings warned Latest report Large-scale data centers are emerging as a major concentration of insurable risks.
The $13 billion financing tied to one location, one operator, and one power configuration concentrates exposure in a way that infrastructure debt has not historically encountered.
The numbers behind the order explain the focus. Meta spent $39 billion on infrastructure in 2024 and $72 billion in 2025.
In its first-quarter 2026 earnings call on April 29, the company raised its 2026 capital expenditures guidance to $115 to $145 billion, up from the $115 to $135 billion it provided in January. Almost all of it goes toward AI data centers. Meta will remain compute-bound through most of 2026, CFO Suzanne Lee said.
What a precedent the deal will set
If the El Paso financing closes at its current size, it will set the standard for how the next wave of massive data centers will be financed with debt and how that risk will be priced. This matters beyond the meta.
JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, SMBC and MUFG are already exploring ways to offload data center exposure to outside investors through large risk transfer deals, a sign that banks’ balance sheets are starting to feel the pressure of AI infrastructure lending.
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