Capex destination reconstructed (backward crawl)

What happened

BlackRock's $12.3B El Paso data-center bond hit "soft demand" (07-25) then rallied and upsized to $12.5B (07-27) — yields reportedly topped 7% amid a broader AI-debt sell-off; not a downsize, a wobble. (Business Times — soft demand)
Meta quit the RE100 clean-energy pledge amid a 7.5GW Louisiana gas buildout — directly cuts against the nuclear/geothermal/solar PPA narrative built over the past year; the freshest, highest-signal item in this crawl. (Electrek)
Moody's warned "unprecedented" AI spending threatens the credit quality of Amazon, Meta, Alphabet and others — four business days before Meta's 07-29 earnings; corroborated by five other outlets same week, but exact rating action/Meta-specific numbers unconfirmed. (CNBC)
Hyperion (Louisiana) confirmed at 5GW / $50B+ — Reuters, CNBC, and Data Center Dynamics converged same-day; Meta also sold 80% of the project to Blue Owl Capital and is fighting an order to disclose jobs/power figures. (Reuters)
El Paso capex boosted sixfold to $10B (1GW), while local politics turned against it — City Council ended new data-center tax breaks (07-21) and a resident "Block Party" protest ran the same week (07-25). (CNBC)
Reuters exclusive: next MTIA chip ("Iris") enters production September 2026 to double Meta's compute capacity — well-corroborated secondhand across 4+ outlets, not primary-verified. (Reuters)
Meta-Broadcom custom-ASIC deal extended through 2029, 1GW+ of custom silicon — announced the same day Broadcom CEO Hock Tan stepped down from Meta's board. (CNBC)
Meta's Nvidia "600K H100-equivalents" figure is stale — superseded by a 1.3M target (2025-01-24) and then "millions... including standalone CPUs" (2026-02-17); no precise current count found. (CNBC)
Nuclear RFP awards unlock up to 6.6GW — Oklo (1.2GW, Ohio), TerraPower (8 Natrium plants), Vistra (Beaver Valley expansion); the original RFP target is disputed between outlets (1.4GW vs. 4GW). (Meta Store, official)
Zuckerberg's "superintelligence" framing has been softening — from "hundreds of billions... now in sight" (2025-07-30) to telling an internal town hall AI agent progress is "more slowly than expected" (2026-07-02), four weeks before earnings. (Business Insider)
The $14.3B Scale AI stake (~49%) and "TBD Lab" have had a rough year — a fourth AI-org restructuring in six months, ~600 layoffs, chief scientist Yann LeCun's departure calling LLMs "a dead end," and sustained "soul-crushing"/"suffocating management" internal coverage through this week; no change to the equity stake itself found. (WSJ — $14.3B deal)
The "~$76B TTM" capex figure could not be corroborated in this crawl — a dedicated query returned zero results; the numbers that actually recur in 2026 coverage are $135B (Jan guidance) and $145B (Apr-Jul coverage). Verify before repeating it.

Sources 0

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11 citations on this entry point at a Google News redirect rather than a publisher, so they can't be attributed or rated: Business Times — soft demand · Electrek · CNBC · Reuters · CNBC · Reuters · CNBC · CNBC · Meta Store, official · Business Insider · WSJ — $14.3B deal

Credibility ratings combine two public datasets: Lin et al. 2023, PNAS Nexus 2(9):pgad286 (CC BY 4.0) for the domain-quality score, and Wikipedia's perennial-sources list (CC BY-SA 4.0) for the reliability tier. A rating describes an outlet's general record, never this particular article. Unrated means absent from those datasets — not a judgement.

The wider story

This event sits inside Meta Capex, which carries how it developed before and since.

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Adjacent threads (shared entities):

· Where the Capex Lands

· Nvidia's Order Book

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