Meta is looking to raise nearly $30B to finance the build-out of artificial intelligence data centers and is turning to some of the biggest names in private capital for help.
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The social media behemoth is in talks with Apollo Global Management, KKR & Co., Brookfield, Carlyle Group, Pimco and other investment giants to secure the massive round of funding, the Financial Times reports. Meta Platforms reportedly hopes to raise $3B through equity investment from private groups and $26B in debt, although other options remain on the table. According to the FT, Meta is looking for ways to structure the debt to make it more easily tradable.
The fund seems to be scaled back from earlier reports that Meta was exploring a $35B data center development fund led by Apollo, with KKR also participating in the financing package.
Meta is locked in an AI infrastructure arms race with cloud providers like Amazon and Google and AI developers like OpenAI. The company this year plans to make $72B in capital expenditures for AI data centers and other infrastructure, with plans for AI capex to hit “hundreds of billions of dollars” in the years ahead, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram is one of the largest global data center end users, operating 28 of its own data center campuses and leasing capacity at many others.
Meta also has several large-scale campuses in its development pipeline, including the controversial 2-gigawatt, 4M SF campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, announced in December. The campus, which would be the firm’s largest, would be powered by an adjacent natural gas power plant. The firm also plans to invest more than $1.6B to develop a pair of campuses in Wisconsin and near Toledo, Ohio.
Meta is also snapping up clean energy to power its data center portfolio. Last week, the firm announced it had purchased 791 megawatts of clean energy from four projects built by renewables developer Invenergy, and it signed a pair of deals for 360 MW of solar power from provider Adapture in Texas. Earlier in June, Meta agreed to buy all 1.1 GW of electricity produced by Constellation Energy’s nuclear power plant in Clinton, Illinois.
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