Meta taps PIMCO, Blue Owl for US$29 billion data centre expansion project, source says

Meta's logo is seen on a sign at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez, File)

Meta has tapped U.S. bond giant PIMCO and alternative asset manager Blue Owl Capital to spearhead a US$29 billion financing for its data center expansion in rural Louisiana, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.

PIMCO will handle about $26 billion of debt, likely to be issued in the form of bonds, while Blue Owl will contribute $3 billion in equity, the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Bloomberg News, which first reported the deal, said that the company has been working with Morgan Stanley to raise funds, while Apollo Global Management and KKR were also in the running to lead the deal until the closing stage of negotiations.

Meta, PIMCO and Blue Owl declined to comment on the report.

The deal comes as Meta looks for partners to help fund its AI infrastructure push. Last week, the company said in a filing that it planned to offload about $2 billion in data center assets as part of a co-development strategy to share the costs of building facilities for generative AI.

In July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centers for its superintelligence unit, intensifying his pursuit of a technology he has chased with a talent war for top engineers.

Its first multi-gigawatt data center, dubbed Prometheus, is expected to come online in 2026, while another, called Hyperion, will be able to scale up to 5 GW over the coming years, Zuckerberg said in a post last month on his Threads social media platform.

In June, the Financial Times reported that Meta was seeking to raise $29 billion from private capital firms to build AI data centers in the U.S., adding that the company is debating how to structure the debt raise and is also evaluating options to raise more capital.

(Reporting by Surbhi Misra and Chandni Shah in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona and Sonia Cheema)