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Meta has secured $29 billion in funding from PIMCO and Blue Owl Capital to support the development of a major data centre in Richland Parish, Louisiana.
Sources familiar with the matter revealed that PIMCO will provide $26 billion in debt financing, while Blue Owl will contribute $3 billion in equity. Meta, PIMCO, and Blue Owl have all declined to comment.
This financial package is a strategic play in what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described as a multibillion-dollar campaign to power up the company’s superintelligence lab.
That lab, led by Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman, is behind Meta’s drive toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) pursuit Zuckerberg has openly committed to with both cash and talent.
The centrepiece of this expansion is Hyperion, a colossal campus under development in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Designed to scale up to 5 gigawatts, Hyperion is expected to become one of the largest AI infrastructure sites globally.
It will sit on 2,250 acres and is projected to create more than 1,500 permanent roles, with construction work peaking at 5,000 jobs. In parallel, another supercomputing hub, Prometheus, is taking shape in New Albany, Ohio, with an initial power target of 1 gigawatt by 2026.
The funding deal is one of the largest infrastructure-driven private financings of its kind. Meta is also moving to shed around $2 billion worth of data centre assets through co-development deals, helping share the cost burden with partners and accelerate deployment timelines.
While the company has pledged to run these data centres using 100% renewable energy, partnering with Entergy to inject 1,500 megawatts of clean power into the grid, environmental groups aren’t fully convinced.
Concerns are growing over the facilities’ potential impact on local water supplies and carbon emissions, particularly since natural gas plants are expected to be used for energy stabilisation.
This comes after months of behind-the-scenes dealmaking. Meta had been working with Morgan Stanley to line up the financing. Apollo Global Management and KKR were reportedly in the race to lead the transaction but were edged out at the final stage.
Back in July, Zuckerberg publicly announced Meta’s long-term infrastructure roadmap, stating: “We’ll be investing hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade to build out our AI capabilities—including several massive data centres to support superintelligence.”
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