Meta Platforms is intensifying its artificial intelligence ambitions with a major financing initiative to build specialized data centers across the United States. The company is in advanced discussions with private credit investors to raise $29 billion, structured as $3 billion in equity and $26 billion in debt, according to a Financial Times report published Friday.
The financing consortium includes prominent firms like Apollo Global Management, KKR, Brookfield, Carlyle, and PIMCO. Meta is reportedly working with Morgan Stanley as an adviser to arrange the financing and exploring ways to make the debt more easily tradeable after issuance.
This fundraising effort aligns with CEO Mark Zuckerberg's January announcement that Meta would spend up to $65 billion in 2025 to expand its AI infrastructure. The investment aims to strengthen Meta's competitive position against rivals like OpenAI and Google in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
Meta is currently constructing a multibillion-dollar data center complex in Louisiana that could be part of this financing. The 4-million-square-foot site in Richland Parish will eventually host up to nine facilities and require more than 2 gigawatts of power—equivalent to the electricity consumption of approximately 750,000 homes. The company has committed to matching 100% of the data center's electricity usage with clean and renewable energy.
The push for AI infrastructure comes just weeks after Meta's $14.8 billion investment in Scale AI, which gave the company a 49% stake in the data labeling startup valued at $29 billion. As part of that deal, Scale AI's 28-year-old CEO Alexandr Wang joined Meta to lead its new "Superintelligence" unit.
Major tech companies are investing heavily in specialized data centers that link thousands of chips into high-performance clusters to power AI workloads. Microsoft has planned $80 billion in capital expenditure for fiscal 2025, with most aimed at expanding data centers to address capacity constraints for AI services.