(Reuters) -Meta has reached a $27 billion financing deal with Blue Owl Capital to fund its largest data center project globally, as big technology companies race to build the infrastructure needed to drive their artificial intelligence ambitions.
Tuesday’s announcement marks the largest private equity deal ever made by Meta. Under the deal, Meta will retain about 20% of the equity in the Louisiana project, with the majority owned by funds managed by alternative asset manager Blue Owl Capital. Blue Owl contributed approximately $7 billion in cash to the joint venture, and Meta received a one-time payment of about $3 billion.
The planned data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, known as Hyperion, is expected to provide more than 2 gigawatts of computing capacity to support the training of large language models, the technology behind tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
Doug Ostrover and Marc Lipschultz, co-CEOs of Blue Owl, called Hyperion “an ambitious project that reflects the scale and speed needed to power the next generation of AI infrastructure.”
Major tech companies, including Alphabet, Amazon.com, Meta, Microsoft and CoreWeave, are on track to spend $400 billion on AI infrastructure this year, Morgan Stanley estimates.
OpenAI, the startup at the heart of the AI ​​boom, recently signed multiple deals that could cost more than $1 trillion to secure about 26 gigawatts of computing capacity, enough to power roughly 20 million American homes.
Meta CFO Susan Li called Tuesday’s deal “a bold step forward.” The company has signed leases for the facility with an initial term of four years with an option to extend and expects the project to create more than 500 jobs once it becomes operational.
Meta reorganized its AI efforts under Superintelligence Labs in June after the departure of senior staff and a poor reception to its open source Llama 4 model. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in July that Meta would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centers for Superintelligence.
(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid and Alan Barona)