Oct 21 (Reuters) - Meta has struck a $27

billion financing deal with Blue Owl Capital to fund its biggest

data center project globally, as large technology companies race

to build out the infrastructure needed to power their artificial

intelligence ambitions.

Tuesday's announcement marks Meta's largest-ever private

capital deal. Under the agreement, Meta will retain about 20%

equity in the Louisiana project, with the majority owned by

funds that alternative asset manager Blue Owl Capital

manages. Blue Owl contributed roughly $7 billion in cash to the

joint venture, with Meta receiving a one-time payout of about $3

billion.

The planned data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, known

as Hyperion, is projected to deliver more than 2 gigawatts of

compute capacity to support training of large language models,

the technology behind tools such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

Doug Ostrover and Marc Lipschultz, Co-CEOs of Blue Owl,

called Hyperion "an ambitious project that reflects the scale

and speed required to power the next generation of AI

infrastructure."

Major tech companies, including Alphabet,

Amazon.com ( AMZN ), Meta, Microsoft ( MSFT ) and

CoreWeave ( CRWV ), are on track to spend $400 billion on AI

infrastructure this year, Morgan Stanley estimates.

OpenAI, the startup at the heart of the AI boom, recently

signed multiple deals that may cost over $1 trillion to secure

about 26 gigawatts of computing capacity, enough to power

roughly 20 million U.S. homes.

Meta's finance chief, Susan Li, called Tuesday's deal "a

bold step forward." The company has signed leases for the

facility with a four-year initial term with an option to extend

and expects the project to create more than 500 jobs once it

goes online.

Meta reorganized its AI efforts under Superintelligence Labs

in June after senior staff departures and a poor reception for

its open-source Llama 4 model. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg

said in July that Meta would spend hundreds of billions of

dollars to build several massive AI data centers for

Superintelligence.