Meta taps Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan for $13B Texas data center financing

Meta is working with Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan on roughly $13 billion in financing for its El Paso data center campus, per a May 4 report. The package is mostly debt with a smaller equity slice. It could become one of the largest single-site digital infrastructure financings on record, though below 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 financing now under discussion is roughly eight times that, scaling the campus to about one gigawatt of capacity.

The EL Paso deal moves data centers out of real estate financing

A campus this size has outgrown traditional commercial real estate debt. Citigroup estimates the broader data center buildout could need $3 trillion by 2030.

El Paso data center | Source: El Paso Times

“If you can’t invest a billion dollars, we don’t even want to talk to you,” Adam Lewis, managing director at Citizens and head of its 35-person digital infrastructure, said. “We can read electrical diagrams and mechanical diagrams and understand land use permits and power configurations.”

Scott Wilcoxen, JPMorgan’s global head of digital infrastructure investment banking, has focused on what he calls “time to power” as the industry’s biggest constraint.

The El Paso deal sits in the same arc as Hyperion, but the structure is different. As Cryptopolitan reported, Hyperion was a joint venture, with Blue Owl owning 80 percent and Meta owning 20 percent through an SPV that raised $27 billion in bonds. El Paso is mostly straight debt, with Meta keeping more direct ownership.

S&P calls hyperscale a concentrated risk

S&P Global Ratings warned in a recent report that hyperscale data centers are emerging as a major concentration of insurable risk.

A $13 billion financing tied to a single site, a single operator, and a single power configuration concentrates exposure in a way infrastructure debt has not historically faced.

The numbers behind the demand explain the concentration. Meta spent $39 billion on infrastructure in 2024 and $72 billion in 2025.

At its Q1 2026 earnings call on April 29, the company raised its 2026 capex guidance to $115 to $145 billion, up from the $115 to $135 billion it gave in January. Almost all of it is going toward AI data centers. CFO Susan Li has said Meta will remain compute-constrained through much of 2026.

What the deal would set as a precedent

If the El Paso financing closes at its current size, it sets a benchmark for how the next wave of mega-scale data centers will be debt-financed and how that risk will be priced. That matters beyond Meta.

JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, SMBC, and MUFG are already exploring ways to offload data center exposure to outside investors through significant risk transfer deals, a sign that bank balance sheets are starting to feel the strain of AI infrastructure lending.

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