Marsh provided project risk analysis and insurance services on a new venture between Meta and BlackRock to develop and own a data center campus in El Paso, Texas, one of the largest single-site AI infrastructure financings to date. The broker's role extended to both sides of the transaction: alongside its work for Meta, Marsh also acted as a technical advisor to the BlackRock funds, working alongside Charles River Associates and Turner & Townsend.
Funds managed by BlackRock will hold an 80% interest in the venture, with Meta retaining the remaining 20%. The parties have committed to fund their respective shares of approximately $14 billion in total development costs.
At financial close, Meta will contribute land and construction-in-progress assets valued at roughly $2.3 billion, while BlackRock will make a cash contribution of approximately $4.9 billion, partly funded through a $12.5 billion debt financing package. To align the ownership stakes at the agreed 80/20 split, Meta will receive a one-time distribution of approximately $1 billion at close. The campus will have 1 gigawatt of compute capacity, with Meta as the venture's initial sole occupant under long-term lease arrangements.
Those leases carry a four-year initial term with four options to extend, giving Meta potential flexibility over a 20-year term. Meta will also provide residual value guarantees on the property with an aggregate threshold of approximately $13 billion that decreases over time; if certain conditions are met within the first 16 years of the lease, Meta's maximum guarantee payment would equal any shortfall between the property's fair value at that point and the declining RVG threshold. That structure effectively puts a long-tail financial backstop in Meta's hands on top of the lease payments themselves, a mechanism insurers and risk advisors on both sides of the deal would have needed to factor into their assessment of the venture's overall risk profile.
"Our partnership with Larry and the team at BlackRock allows us to move faster and at greater scale, pairing our deep expertise in designing and operating world-class data centers with one of the world's leading infrastructure investors," said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's founder and CEO.
"This transaction highlights the strength and scale of our combined capabilities with GIP and HPS, and how we can offer clients compelling investment opportunities at the center of AI infrastructure and energy," said Larry Fink, BlackRock's chairman and CEO.
Beyond Marsh, the deal drew on a substantial advisory bench: Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan Securities served as financial advisors to Meta, with Latham & Watkins as Meta's legal counsel and Eversheds Sutherland advising Meta specifically on leasing matters. Arthur D. Little served as commercial due diligence advisor to Meta, and Arup provided technical and environmental independent engineer services. On the BlackRock side, Kirkland & Ellis served as legal counsel to the funds, while Milbank advised Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan. The breadth of that advisory roster, spanning financial, legal, technical and risk functions on both sides of the transaction, underlines the scale of specialist work now required to bring hyperscale data center projects to financial close.
The El Paso venture lands in the middle of what brokers and analysts are calling a data center insurance supercycle. Global data center investment is projected to reach roughly $3 trillion over the next five years, with the six largest US hyperscalers, including Meta, expected to have spent close to $400 billion in 2025 alone, and construction costs per megawatt rising from $7.7 million to $10.7 million between 2020 and 2025.
Marsh has built a dedicated response to that growth. Its Nimbus facility now offers up to $2.7 billion in capacity across the UK, US, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, covering construction all-risk, delay in start-up, property damage and business interruption exposures.
Marsh has separately introduced Nimbus Casualty, offering up to $75 million in excess general liability capacity for US digital infrastructure construction, backed by a panel of Lloyd's and London market insurers. Aon expanded its Data Center Lifecycle Insurance Program to $2.5 billion in January, and Willis has introduced a competing solution for data center owners and operators.
That capacity build-out reflects growing strain in the market. Industry commentators describe insuring campuses valued at $10 billion to $20 billion or more as having gone from nearly impossible in 2023 to a routine weekly conversation in 2026, with insurers under pressure to price cover for projects whose financing, and risk-transfer structures like the RVG arrangement built into this deal, are as complex as their construction.
For a deal of the El Paso venture's size, that makes a specialist risk advisor less a footnote than a precondition for getting the financing across the line - one reason Marsh's presence spans both parties to the transaction rather than just one.
The El Paso location places the venture squarely in a state where power grid risk has become a distinct underwriting concern. Texas now ranks second nationally with 461 data centers, or 10.7% of the US total, behind only Virginia, and its ERCOT grid operates as an isolated system that cannot draw on interstate power imports during periods of extreme stress. Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 knocked multiple Houston-area data centers offline without physical damage to the facilities themselves, a scenario standard property business interruption cover does not respond to since it requires physical damage as a trigger.
Non-damage business interruption extensions, covering both grid supply failures and ERCOT-mandated load shedding during demand response events, have become a standard requirement for Texas data center risk as a result.
That risk sits within a broader coverage challenge AM Best has flagged for the sector nationally. The US is home to 4,287 data centers as of May 2026, and the scale of AI workloads, concentration of high-value equipment and interconnected nature of modern computing infrastructure mean required coverage is evolving beyond what the traditional property and casualty industry has previously handled, according to David Blades, associate director of industry research and analytics at AM Best.
For insurance professionals, the transaction underscores that data center risk advisory is now a distinct, fast-growing line of business, sitting alongside construction, casualty and property lines as capital partners commit tens of billions of dollars to sites that are testing the limits of conventional coverage - and increasingly requiring advisors who can work across both sides of a deal's ownership structure rather than a single client's interests alone.
