They are building the machinery of the next economy in a shell company in the desert, loading it with borrowed billions, and calling it investment. BlackRock is leading a debt sale targeting at least $12 billion for a new data-center project in El Paso backed by Meta Platforms — the fifteen-trillion-dollar asset manager owning eighty percent of the joint venture through its infrastructure and private-credit arms, Meta owning twenty percent and using the facilities, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley managing the offering. Meta just expanded its Louisiana data center to $50 billion under the same 80/20 architecture, Big Tech AI capital expenditure heading toward $168 billion in a single quarter while the communities that host the concrete and the wire wait to learn what they got in the exchange.
I will grant the strongest honest point first. These data centers are real. The concrete gets poured, the wire gets strung, and construction workers draw real paychecks for the year or two it takes to raise the buildings. The computing infrastructure they house is not optional; the economy that is coming will run on it the way the last economy ran on railroads and electricity. The question is not whether it gets built. The question is who owns it, who borrows against it, who extracts the rent, and who answers to the town when the debt comes due.
Here is what the page says. BlackRock, fifteen trillion dollars under management, owns eighty percent of the project through its infrastructure and private-credit arms. Meta, which will use the data centers, owns twenty percent and carries none of the debt. JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley are selling the bonds to investors who will never see El Paso. The structure mirrors the Louisiana deal, where Blue Owl Capital held the eighty-percent stake and BlackRock was among the buyers. Now BlackRock has graduated from buyer to owner. It has spent the past several years acquiring Global Infrastructure Partners and HPS Investment Partners — precisely so it could hold the asset rather than merely finance it. The firm is not intermediating anymore. It is owning. And the debt — twelve billion dollars of it, at least — is not BlackRock’s debt. It is the debt of the joint venture, which is to say the debt of the asset, which is to say El Paso’s problem if anything goes wrong.
I traded agricultural futures for a living. I know this structure from the inside. You spin up an entity — call it a joint venture, call it a partnership, call it six letters in Delaware — load it with other people’s debt, attach it to a real asset in a real place, and extract your management fees and carried interest while the investors bear the risk and the town bears the consequences. The asset lives in El Paso. The ownership lives in Manhattan. The cash flows travel north. I traded the corn before it was planted; I know how little the men in the towers think about the men in the field.
The conservative movement once had a word for this arrangement. It was called rent-seeking — extracting returns from the control of an asset rather than from the production of something useful. Louis Brandeis called bigness a curse. Chesterton said the trouble was not too much capitalism but too few capitalists. The whole distributist tradition — the Popes in their encyclicals, Belloc with his Servile State, Kirk with his contempt for Chamber-of-Commerce conservatism — argued that widely distributed productive property was the only reliable foundation of a free society. When the owners are absent, when the debt is loaded onto a shell, when the cash flows to a manager who answers to no one in the county, you do not have an economy. You have a lease.
El Paso will see construction employment for a season. It will see permanent jobs — technicians, security, maintenance — measured in the hundreds rather than the thousands, for a facility that will consume the electrical output of a small city. It will see its grid strained and its water table asked to cool machines that run without sleeping. And it will see none of the ownership, none of the equity appreciation, and none of the decision-making power over how the infrastructure is used, maintained, or eventually sold to the next buyer. The entity that owns it will file reports in Delaware. The entity that borrows against it will sell bonds in Manhattan. The entity that uses it will run its algorithms in Menlo Park. The county will have a light on the horizon and a line on the budget.
My own county knows the pattern. The railroad came through in 1912, and by 1995 it was Union Pacific’s, and by then the jobs had been cut to a fraction and the decisions made in Omaha. The farm cooperative down the road sells potatoes into a contract with a snack-food giant that owns neither the land nor the drought risk. The county’s best economic hope these days is a golf resort built on the barrens by a man from Chicago, and the people are honest enough to ask what it means when a community’s best future is to serve someone else’s leisure. The template is the same every time: outside capital acquires the productive asset, loads the risk onto the structure and the community, extracts the returns, and moves on when the returns thin. The difference with BlackRock is only one of scale. It does not need to own the railroad. It owns the wiring.
A conservative who still meant what the word once meant would ask a different question than the one the Deals section invites. Not: will this investment create jobs? Jobs are the bait. The question is: who will own the infrastructure of the next economy, and can that ownership be held closer to the people who depend on it?
The answer from the cooperative tradition is specific and proven. Rural electric cooperatives — built with long-term public credit through the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, owned by their members, governed by their members — electrified rural America when no investor-owned utility thought it profitable enough to bother. Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative, headquartered in my town, serves some thirty-one thousand member-owners across twelve central Wisconsin counties. It exists because someone decided the wire should belong to the people who needed it, not to the holding company that would leave when the margins thinned. The REA did not abolish the market. It created a form of ownership in which the people who depended on the infrastructure also held the title. That is not socialism. It is the oldest conservative principle there is — that the man who depends on a thing ought to have a voice in how it is run.
Nobody is proposing a cooperative data center in El Paso. The thought would strike most people as impractical, which tells you how completely the imagination of concentrated capital has colonized the conservative mind. A generation ago the notion that a fifteen-trillion-dollar firm would own the infrastructure of a community’s digital future — financed by twelve billion in debt managed by the two largest investment banks in the country — would have struck anyone on Main Street as the very thing the republic was built to resist. Today it sits in the Deals section, and the editorial page across the hall reads it as a sign of progress.
It is not free enterprise. It is the condition Belloc described — the state in which a people trades its independence for the assurance that its infrastructure will be built by someone else, on someone else’s terms, with someone else’s money, for someone else’s benefit. The community gets the construction dust and the electric bill. The asset manager gets eighty percent of a joint venture in the desert. The platform gets to own twenty and use a hundred. The debt investors get their yield. And a movement that once believed in the sovereignty of the small proprietor over his own livelihood and the primacy of the rooted community over the claims of distant capital reads about it over breakfast and finds an investment story.
They used to conserve things. Now they finance them.