Meta announced the availability of $29 billion in financing from the United States bond giant PIMCO and Alternative Asset Management, Blue Owl Capital, to advance the global data centre infrastructure. This large amount will be used mainly for the construction of new AI-driven data centres, the procurement of advanced equipment and support for technology development to meet the rapidly growing needs of Meta in the areas of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and meta-cosm.
According to Reuters and Bloomberg, Meta’s $29 billion financing was dominated by PIMCO in the $26 billion bond debt component, Blue Owl Capital provided $3 billion in equity investment, and Morgan Stanley served as a financial adviser. The funding will be used for a data centre expansion project in rural areas of Louisiana, with a focus on the construction of a dogiva-class data centre called Hyperion, which is expected to be completed in phases in 2030, with an area of 2250 acres and a facility of approximately 4 million square feet.
The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, had previously indicated that the company planned to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the construction of the AI data centre, that Prometheus, the first facility, was expected to be on line by 2026, and that Hyperion could be expanded to 5 GW capacity. Meta ‘ s flexible strategy in the area of capital-intensive AI infrastructure was demonstrated by the sale of approximately $2 billion of data centre assets and the use of cooperative development models to share construction costs.
In June of this year, the British Financial Times reported that Meta was seeking $29 billion from a private capital company to build an artificial intelligence data centre in the United States, adding that the company was discussing how to build debt financing while also assessing options for raising additional funds.
Blue Owl manages approximately $192 billion in assets. The company was not known for its investment in data centres in the past, but has undertaken a number of large-scale initiatives in this area over the past year. The company recently completed a $7 billion digital infrastructure fund. It has also recently acquired IPI Partners to take over from Stack Industries and Radius DC, a United States regional margin computation company.
In addition, it has established a $5 billion joint venture with Chirisa Technology Parks and Powerhouse Data Centers to develop data centres throughout the United States, mainly serving the artificial intelligent cloud company CoreWeave.