2026-07-28 — El Paso’s financing structure completes, one day before earnings

• Meta and BlackRock formalized a $14B El Paso, TX data-center joint venture — BlackRock-managed funds (with Global Infrastructure Partners and HPS Investment Partners) take an 80% stake, financed partly by the $12.5B bond that just priced; Meta keeps 20%, contributing ~$2.3B of land and in-progress construction. The 1GW campus, already under construction, targets 2028 operations — the same 80/20 off-balance-sheet pattern as Hyperion’s Blue Owl sale, now repeated at a second site the day before earnings. (Meta) (CNBC) ⟨daily 2026-07-28⟩

2026-07-23 — Thread opened

• Opened — backfilled with the two 07-22 items below, previously tagged only to entities, no thread. ⟨steer 2026-07-23⟩

← Backstory

2026-07-22 — Two supply-hedge signals in one day

• Meta committed to 6GW of AMD Instinct MI450-series capacity — alongside OpenAI’s 6GW and Anthropic’s 2GW, signed the same day as AMD’s Advancing AI event — Meta hedging compute supply beyond Nvidia. (Tech Times) ⟨steer 2026-07-23, evidence dated 2026-07-22⟩
• Meta reportedly in talks for a $10B Anthropic cloud deal that would make Meta a fourth major cloud provider. ⚠ single-outlet, rumor-sourced — unconfirmed pending Meta’s 07-29 earnings. (Motley Fool) ⟨steer 2026-07-23, evidence dated 2026-07-22⟩

2026-07-27 — Capex destination reconstructed (backward crawl)

Full crawl finding: artifacts/findings/meta-capex-2026-07-27.md · bundle: artifacts/bundles/meta-capex-2026-07-27/

• 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) ⟨crawl 2026-07-27, evidence dated 2026-07-25/27⟩
• 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) ⟨crawl 2026-07-27, evidence dated 2026-07-24⟩
• 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) ⟨crawl 2026-07-27, evidence dated 2026-07-24⟩
• 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) ⟨crawl 2026-07-27, evidence dated 2026-07-13⟩
• 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) ⟨crawl 2026-07-27, evidence dated 2026-03-26⟩
• 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) ⟨crawl 2026-07-27, evidence dated 2026-07-13⟩
• 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) ⟨crawl 2026-07-27, evidence dated 2026-04-14⟩
• 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) ⟨crawl 2026-07-27, evidence dated 2026-02-17⟩
• 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) ⟨crawl 2026-07-27, evidence dated 2026-01-09⟩
• 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) ⟨crawl 2026-07-27, evidence dated 2026-07-02⟩
• 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) ⟨crawl 2026-07-27, evidence dated 2025-06-10⟩
• 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. ⟨crawl 2026-07-27⟩