Facebook parent Meta has managed to convince private equity firm Blue Owl Capital to finance its 2.2 gigawatt Hyperion datacenter project in Richland Parish, Louisiana.
Meta sealed the deal with the private equity firm on Thursday for roughly $27 billion in debt and 1.5 billion in equity financing, according to a Bloomberg report citing persons familiar with the matter.
The agreement, which was reportedly brokered by Morgan Stanley, will see Meta retain a 20 percent stake in the colossal datacenter project and has been structured in such a way as to keep the debt off of the Social Network’s balance sheets.
The debt, which Bloomberg reports will be carried by the financier, is set to mature in 2049 and is said to be fully amortizing. Meta, meanwhile, will be responsible for building, operating, and ultimately leasing the facility when it comes online in 2029.
First announced in late December, the four million square-foot datacenter campus, since branded as Hyperion, was originally expected to cost $10 billion — a figure we suspect didn’t include critical IT hardware like servers and networking.
Since then, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions have grown, and the site is now expected to top five gigawatts of total compute capacity making it one of the largest single datacenter projects of the AI boom so far.
However, achieving this will require a substantial expansion of power infrastructure. As we learned in December, Meta has commissioned a new natural gas generator plant to be built by local utility operator Entergy.
At least for the initial build out, the gas plant would employ three combined cycle combustion turbine generators with a total generative capacity of over 2.2 gigawatts.
Meta’s Hyperion datacenter development is one of several already underway. Just this week, Meta announced a new datacenter complex in El Paso, Texas, that’s expected to scale to a gigawatt of compute capacity.
The Instagram parent is also working on another gigawatt datacenter development in Ohio called Prometheus which is expected to become operational next year.
El Reg reached out to Meta and Blue Owl for comment, but had not heard back at the time of publication. ®
