Meta in $27 billion financing deal with Blue Owl Capital for Louisiana data center

By Jaspreet Singh and Aditya Soni (Reuters) -Meta has struck a $27 billion financing deal with Blue Owl Capital to fund its biggest data center project globally, as large technology companies race to build out the infrastructure needed to power their artificial intelligence ambitions. Tuesday's announcement marks Meta's largest-ever private capital deal. Under it, Meta will retain about 20% equity in the Louisiana project, with the majority owned by funds that alternative asset manager Blue Owl Capital manages. Blue Owl contributed roughly $7 billion in cash to the joint venture, with Meta receiving a one-time payout of about $3 billion. The planned data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, known as Hyperion, is projected to deliver more than 2 gigawatts of compute capacity to support training of large language models, the technology behind tools such as 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 required 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 may cost over $1 trillion to secure about 26 gigawatts of computing capacity, enough to power roughly 20 million U.S. homes. Meta's finance chief, Susan Li, called Tuesday's deal "a bold step forward." The company has signed leases for the facility with a four-year initial term with an option to extend and expects the project to create more than 500 jobs once it goes online. "It definitely helps them mitigate risks at the expense of its ownership stake. Meta won't need to provide nearly as much capital and can look to finance other facilities or AI infrastructure," said Alvin Nguyen, senior analyst at Forrester. "It also minimizes the debt they are taking on for equipment and property in the event there is a bursting of the AI bubble." (Reporting by Jaspreet Singh and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid and Alan Barona)

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