BlackRock’s $25 billion M&A spree is starting to click. The company is raising $12 billion of debt for a Texas data center to be occupied by Meta — its first deal that puts infrastructure investor GIP and private-credit firm HPS to work in a major way since BlackRock bought them in 2024 and 2025.
When Fink struck those deals — at prices rich enough to raise eyebrows across Wall Street — the question was whether they would remain profitable fiefdoms. Asset-manager deals are notoriously hard to pull off, and he had brought two fiercely founder-led firms into his ultimate founder-led firm. A clash of priorities, if not wills, seemed possible. But it seems to be working.
“The marriage of BlackRock, HPS, and GIP across the board on the origination side is only accelerating,” CEO Larry Fink told analysts last week. “As we originate more and more, then we can go to our clients, like insurance companies, and see much more conversion.”
Double-click on that last line: When BlackRock no longer needs JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley to sit in the middle — the banks are marketing the latest bonds — is when things on Wall Street get interesting. I don’t think it’s far off.
Elsewhere in Fink’s growing empire, a fight at Aston Martin has two arms of BlackRock on opposing sides.