Meta and Blue Owl Capital partner on $27 billion AI data center project

meta announced Tuesday that it has entered into a joint venture deal worth $27 billion with Blue Owl Capital to finance and develop the social media company’s massive Hyperion data center in rural Louisiana.

As part of the transaction, the asset management company will own 80% of the joint venture, while Mehta will retain a 20% stake and oversee construction and asset management services for the data center being built in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Blue Owl contributed approximately $7 billion in cash as part of the joint venture, while Meta received an upfront payment of $3 billion.

The partnership will give Meta the “speed and flexibility” it needs to build out its data centers and support its “long-term AI ambitions,” the social media company said in a statement.

Meta announced in December that it had selected Louisiana for what will be its largest data center. Construction of the facility, which is being built on a site the size of approximately 1,700 soccer fields, is scheduled to be completed by 2030.

Local power company Entergy told CNBC in June that the new data center could use about twice as much electricity as the city of New Orleans on peak days.

Meta is spending heavily on artificial intelligence amid broader competition from other tech giants, including: alphabet ChatGPT maker OpenAI is also developing a huge data center to power future AI models.

open AI, oracle SoftBank and SoftBank formed the Stargate joint venture in January, under which the two companies will invest $500 billion in data center development over the next few years. The first Stargate data center site went live in September in Abilene, Texas, 290 miles west of Dallas.

Google announced last week that it will invest $15 billion in a data center project in southern India that will become the search giant’s largest AI hub in the world outside the United States.

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