On July 29, 2026, Meta and BlackRock —together with Global Infrastructure Partners and HPS— announced a joint venture to build a 1-gigawatt (GW) artificial intelligence data center campus in El Paso, Texas, at a total development cost of approximately $14 billion. The project, expected to come online in 2028, would represent one of the largest AI infrastructure deployments on U.S. soil and places Texas at the center of the global AI compute map. For small and medium-sized businesses in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and across the border region, this is not just Wall Street news: it's a concrete promise of greater compute availability, lower latency, and more competitive pricing for AI services in the coming years.
What Exactly Did Meta and BlackRock Announce?
The joint venture will combine institutional capital from BlackRock and Global Infrastructure Partners with Meta's technological vision and compute demand to build a multi-data-center campus in El Paso with a total capacity of 1,000 megawatts — enough to power hundreds of thousands of AI servers simultaneously. HPS Investment Partners is also participating in the financing. The estimated $14 billion cost exceeds prior projects like OpenAI's Stargate in Texas, placing this facility among the largest private AI infrastructure investments in history. Meta will use this capacity to train and run its next generations of Llama models, agentic Llama variants, and AI services embedded in WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger — platforms that Latin American SMBs already use daily for sales and customer service.
"When Meta builds 1 GW of AI compute three hours from Houston, they're not preparing for the future — they're building the highway autonomous SMB agents will travel in 2028 and beyond."
Davarion Group & LabsReal Impact for SMBs in Texas and Latin America
- 01More regional compute = lower latency for AI APIs: greater server capacity in Texas means faster responses for AI agents using Meta's services from Houston, San Antonio, Austin, and border cities.
- 02More powerful Llama models at lower cost: Meta historically releases open Llama versions with each infrastructure cycle; more training compute means more capable models available for free, letting SMBs deploy them without paying per-API-call fees.
- 03More robust WhatsApp Business AI: with more dedicated infrastructure, WhatsApp Business bots and AI agents answering customers will become more reliable and context-aware — directly benefiting restaurants, clinics, e-commerce, and service businesses.
- 04Recommended action now: audit which Meta platforms your business already uses (WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger) and plan how to integrate AI agents before your competitors do; 2028 will arrive sooner than expected.
This $14 billion investment doesn't happen in isolation. It follows the $500 billion Stargate initiative between OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, and the data centers NVIDIA is co-developing with multiple partners in Texas. The state is becoming the epicenter of North American AI infrastructure, driven by relatively cheap energy, favorable regulation, and access to technical talent. For SMBs in the region, this means that over the next 24 months there will be more competition among AI compute providers, which historically translates into lower API prices, greater availability, and new accessible tools. Businesses that start building their processes on AI today will be positioned to capitalize on this infrastructure cycle when it matures.
At Davarion Group & Labs, headquartered in Houston, TX, we track every AI infrastructure development in the region because it directly impacts the cost and capability of the autonomous agents we build for our clients. If your business wants to understand how this new wave of AI compute — from El Paso to Meta's servers — can translate into real automation of sales, customer service, or internal processes, reach out to us at davarion.com. We are helping SMBs in Houston and across Latin America prepare for the agent AI economy that is already arriving.
