Three mega-deals in one summer. Between July 6 and July 29, 2026, roughly $133 billion in AI data center commitments hit the wire — and they could not be more different in shape, scale, and strategy. Meta teamed up with the world's biggest asset manager. A former bitcoin miner locked in Anthropic as a tenant for two decades. And two energy giants proposed a $100 billion campus on the site of an old uranium plant. Same race, three very different horses.
If you are trying to make sense of who is actually building the AI future — and who is just renting it — this is the comparison that matters. Here is how the three deals stack up.
Round 1: Meta x BlackRock — The Wall Street Special
On July 28, Meta Platforms and BlackRock announced a joint venture to build a $14 billion, 1-gigawatt AI data center campus in El Paso, Texas. The structure is what makes it notable: an 80/20 split in BlackRock's favor, with BlackRock-managed funds contributing roughly $4.9 billion in equity and Meta putting in around $2.3 billion. The remaining ~$12.5 billion comes from bond financing — BlackRock's Global Energy & Power Infrastructure unit completed the debt package in the same week.
For Meta, this is its largest external infrastructure venture to date. For BlackRock, it is a template: Wall Street money financing the AI buildout without taking on chip risk. Notably, the $14 billion price tag does not include the GPUs — a 1GW campus typically costs $35 billion to $50 billion once the silicon is inside. Meta brings the compute; BlackRock brings the capital stack.
Round 2: TeraWulf x Anthropic — The Crypto Comeback
On July 6, former bitcoin miner TeraWulf announced a 20-year lease with Anthropic — the lab behind Claude — worth about $19 billion in contracted revenue. The deal covers 401 megawatts of capacity at TeraWulf's Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky. First half of the capacity lands in late 2027; the rest follows in early 2028. Shares jumped 17% on the news.
TeraWulf is the latest in a line of neocloud operators — CoreWeave, IREN, Nscale, Crusoe — converting mining infrastructure into AI compute. The thesis is simple: mining rigs and GPU clusters share the same power, cooling, and rack engineering, and the crypto winter made that capacity cheap. Anthropic gets a dedicated campus without owning a kilowatt. TeraWulf also sold a majority stake in its Abernathy venture to Fluidstack in the same week, doubling down on the AI pivot.
Round 3: Brookfield x NextEra — The Energy Titan Play
Then came the heavyweight. On July 29, Brookfield and NextEra unveiled plans for a $100 billion AI data center and energy campus at the U.S. Department of Energy's Paducah site in western Kentucky — the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which enriched uranium from 1952 until 2013. The 3,556-acre federal site comes with transmission, water, and fiber already in place.
The headline numbers: more than 1.2 GW of computing capacity, backed by up to 2 GW of natural-gas generation and 2.6 GW of battery storage — a 4.6 GW energy portfolio that exceeds the compute load. Brookfield would own and operate the data center; NextEra would build the power and storage. The project is explicitly tied to the White House's Ratepayer Protection Pledge, with Big Rivers Electric, Jackson Purchase Energy Cooperative, and Paducah Power System handling the grid side. Operations could start in 2028, with full buildout by 2032.
Here is the $133 billion scoreboard at a glance:
| Metric | Meta x BlackRock | TeraWulf x Anthropic | Brookfield x NextEra |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commitment | $14B | $19B (contracted) | $100B |
| Location | El Paso, TX | Hawesville, KY | Paducah, KY |
| Compute | 1 GW | 401 MW | 1.2 GW+ |
| Structure | 80/20 JV + bonds | 20-year lease | Campus + energy assets |
| Power plan | Grid-sourced | Grid-sourced | 2 GW gas + 2.6 GW battery |
| Timeline | Not disclosed | Late 2027 – 2028 | 2028 – 2032 |
Each deal wins a different category. If the prize is raw ambition, Brookfield and NextEra take it — $100 billion and an energy portfolio bigger than the data center itself, on federal land with the full weight of the DOE behind it. This is the blueprint for how AI infrastructure gets built when the grid cannot keep up: generate your own power.
If the prize is capital efficiency, Meta and BlackRock win. The 80/20 structure lets Meta offload most of the financing risk to institutional money while keeping strategic control of a 1GW campus. Wall Street just discovered AI real estate is a yield product, and this deal is the proof of concept.
And if the prize is execution certainty, TeraWulf and Anthropic take the crown. A 20-year lease with contracted revenue is the only one of the three with a locked-in customer, a fixed price, and a firm schedule. No construction speculation, no power-market exposure — just convert the mining sheds and collect.
The bigger story is that all three can be right. The AI buildout has gotten so large that there is room for asset managers, ex-miners, and utility giants simultaneously. The question is no longer whether AI data centers get built — it is whose balance sheet, and whose grid, carries the load. This summer's $133 billion answered that question three different ways.
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