Meta has reportedly appointed major private investment firms PIMCO and Blue Owl Capital to lead a massive $29 billion financing package for the expansion of its data centre in Louisiana.
According to a Reuters report, PIMCO will manage $26 billion in debt financing, while Blue Owl will contribute $3 billion in equity.
Bloomberg reported that Morgan Stanley has been working with Meta to raise funds, with Apollo Management and KKR also vying to take the lead until the final stage of negotiations.
The Louisiana campus will span 2,250 acres and include up to nine buildings totalling four million square feet, with construction planned in phases through 2030.
Meta’s strategic move underscores the company’s aggressive push into AI infrastructure as the tech giant continues to allocate capital and resources to AI development.
Last week, the company said it would sell approximately $2 billion in data centre assets as part of a co-development strategy to share the costs of building facilities for generative AI.
In July, Meta announced plans to build an AI data centre in the US which is almost the size of Manhattan, covering an area of around 59 square kilometres or 23 square miles.
Writing on the social media platform threads, Zuckerberg said the New Albany, Ohio-based data centre, called Prometheus, will be the first of several multi-gigawatt (GW) clusters.
The second, called Hyperion, will be able to scale up to five (GW) over several years.
Zuckerberg added the company is building “multiple” titan clusters. Hyperion will be built in Louisiana, with the site expected to go live from 2030.
Zuckerberg added the data centres will form part of the company’s “superintelligence effort” which involves putting together the “most elite and talent-dense” team in the industry.
“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher,” Zuckerberg said. “I’m looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!”
During the same month, news emerged that Zuckerberg is putting together a new team focused on the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). According to Bloomberg, Zuckerberg is personally recruiting about 50 experts, including a new head of AI research, to lead the “superintelligence” team.
Prior to this, the Financial Times reported that Meta was seeking to raise $29 billion from private equity firms to build AI data centres in the US, with the company looking to structure the debt increase and considering options to raise more capital.
