Two Ways to Buy a Gigawatt: Meta Sold 80% of Its Data Centre — OpenAI Needed a Guarantor

A BitsMinds analysis. Two ways of paying for a gigawatt-scale AI data centre were made public within about a day of each other, and they are almost perfect opposites. On July 28, Meta and BlackRock announced a joint venture for a 1 GW campus in El Paso, Texas at roughly $14 billion of development cost. A day earlier came reports that Nvidia is in talks to guarantee about $250 billion of financing for OpenAI's 10 GW campus in Ohio.

Same asset class, same problem, opposite solutions — and the difference says more about the two buyers than any press release does.

What Meta actually did

Meta didn't borrow against the campus. It sold most of it.

Piece	Detail
Ownership	BlackRock-managed funds take 80% — Meta keeps 20%
Meta's contribution	Land and in-progress construction assets worth about $2.3bn
BlackRock's cash	About $4.9bn
Debt in the structure	About $12.5bn
Who else is in	Global Infrastructure Partners and HPS Investment Partners — both part of BlackRock
The asset	1 GW, already under construction, online 2028; Meta operates it

Meta is one of the most profitable companies on earth and could have funded this from cash flow. It chose not to. Handing 80% of the equity to infrastructure funds moves roughly $14bn of build cost off its own balance sheet while keeping operational control of the facility it will actually use.

Side by side

Dimension	Meta / BlackRock	OpenAI / Nvidia (reported)
Mechanism	Sell 80% of the equity	Have the chip supplier guarantee the debt
Where the money comes from	Outside tech — asset managers	Inside the AI supply chain
Who carries the downside	BlackRock's investors, pro rata	Nvidia's balance sheet
What the buyer gives up	80% of the upside	No equity — but deep dependence on one supplier
Scale	1 GW · ~$14bn	10 GW · could exceed $500bn with chips
Status	Announced and structured	Reported talks — nothing signed

The structure is a credit report

This is the part worth internalising. A company that can borrow cheaply sells equity by choice; a company that cannot borrow at all needs someone to co-sign.

Meta had options and picked the one that preserves flexibility. OpenAI, by the reporting, does not have that luxury: it is not profitable and cannot qualify for investment-grade credit on its own, which is precisely why a guarantor is needed at all. Two financing structures, two very different underlying balance sheets — and you can read the second one off the first without seeing a single financial statement.

Where the money comes from matters more than how much

The Meta deal pulls capital in from outside the AI industry. BlackRock, GIP and HPS manage money for pension funds, insurers and sovereign funds — investors who want long-dated, contracted infrastructure returns and have no particular view on whether AI models keep improving. That is genuine diversification of who is funding the build-out.

The Nvidia arrangement does the opposite: it keeps the risk inside the supply chain. The chip vendor underwrites the customer's ability to buy chips. It is the same pattern as AMD's $5bn equity investment in Anthropic and Nvidia's roughly $40bn of equity bets across the sector, just far larger. When suppliers finance customers, revenue is real but the risk has not left the industry — it has only moved from one balance sheet to another.