Blue Owl Capital, BlackRock back 5-gigawatt Meta expansion
Meta Platforms scaled up its data center project in rural Richland Parish, Louisiana, to 5 gigawatts of computing capacity and said Monday the facility will now cost more than $50 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The project, originally estimated at $27 billion, will be Meta’s largest data center and ranks among the biggest investments in artificial-intelligence infrastructure worldwide, the company said.
Private-credit manager Blue Owl Capital owns a major stake in the project, which has also attracted investors including BlackRock, the Journal reported.
Meta has agreed to pay the costs of energy, water and related infrastructure used by the data center. In March, the company reached a deal with Entergy Louisiana to fund the energy infrastructure for the project.
The expansion comes as the four largest technology companies — Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta — are on track to spend an estimated $168 billion on AI infrastructure in the second quarter, according to Wall Street analyst estimates cited by The Wall Street Journal, representing a 74% increase from a year earlier. MSI previously reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in May the company may have overbuilt its computing capacity and was considering renting out excess capacity through a new cloud business.
The Louisiana project has already generated significant local economic effects. In June, the Richland Parish School Board announced teacher bonuses of as much as $50,935 funded by a surge in sales tax revenue tied to the Hyperion data center construction, MSI reported.