Meta Inks $29B Financing Deal for Louisiana Data Center

Data centers are increasingly a capital-heavy investment for technology companies battling to keep up in the artificial intelligence arms race. Just ask Meta.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company tapped Pimco and Blue Owl Capital to lead a $29 billion financing package for its data center in Louisiana, Bloomberg reported. Pimco is pacing the package with $26 billion in debt, while Blue Owl is expected to bring in $3 billion of equity.

The debt is expected to be issued via investment-grade bonds backed by the data center assets. Representatives for the three companies declined to comment.

Meta worked with Morgan Stanley to raise funds for the asset. Apollo Global Management and KKR were in talks about the capital until the final round of negotiations and more investors could ultimately pile in.

The financing is likely intended for a massive data center project unveiled by Zuckerberg last month, known as Hyperion. The data center will supply Meta’s AI lab with five gigawatts of computational power and is expected to be large enough to cover most of Manhattan.

The official unveiling of Hyperion didn’t include an address, but evidence points towards Richland Parish, where Meta earlier announced a $10 billion, 4-million-square-foot data center project. Hyperion is expected to be ready to provide a portion of its eventual computational power by 2030.

At the start of the year, Meta disclosed its capital expenditures for 2025 were expected to range from $60 billion to $65 billion, according to a Facebook post by Zuckerberg. That’s a significant jump from the nearly $40 billion the company spent a year ago.

Much of that estimated capital expenditure budget was anticipated to go towards building and expanding data centers. In 2022, Meta unveiled plans for an $800 million data center in central Texas set to span nearly 400 acres and 900,000 square feet.

Data centers are estimated to account for 20 percent of the country’s energy consumption by the end of the decade, up from 2.5 percent in 2022, according to industry experts.

Management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, meanwhile, estimated that data centers will need $6.7 trillion to meet global computing power demand by 2030.

— Holden Walter-Warner