Meta seeks $29bn private capital for AI infrastructure expansion
BY MOTOLANI OSENI
Meta Platforms Inc., the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is in advanced discussions with major private capital firms to raise up to $29 billion to fund its ambitious push into artificial intelligence infrastructure.
According to the Financial Times, Meta is engaging top private credit investors, including Apollo Global Management, KKR, Brookfield, Carlyle, and Pimco, in a bid to secure $3 billion in equity and an additional $26 billion in debt to finance the construction of advanced data centres across the United States.
The tech giant is reportedly working with investment bank Morgan Stanley to structure the fundraising, with a focus on making the debt portion more liquid and tradeable to address concerns among potential investors, given the scale of the transaction. If successful, the raise would be among the largest of its kind in the private capital market.
The move highlights Meta’s intensified efforts to catch up with rivals like OpenAI and Google in the rapidly evolving AI sector. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has increased capital spending and strategic recruitment to bolster Meta’s AI capabilities.
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In May, the company raised its capital expenditure forecast for 2025 to between $64 billion and $72 billion, citing the need for expanded infrastructure to support AI model development and deployment.
Despite its investment in the Llama large language model series, Meta’s Llama 4 has reportedly fallen short of expectations, and delays have hit its next-generation “Behemoth” model.
In response, the company has invested $15 billion in ScaleAI, a startup focused on data labelling for AI, and appointed its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead a new superintelligence unit working on artificial general intelligence.
Zuckerberg is also pursuing top-tier AI talent, offering sign-on bonuses as high as $100 million to lure leading engineers, including former OpenAI staff. To meet the high energy demands of AI infrastructure, Meta has secured a 20-year agreement to purchase power from a nuclear plant in Illinois—its first of such deals—and signed four additional clean energy agreements with Invenergy.
Meta’s approach mirrors a growing trend in the tech industry, where companies are turning to private capital to finance large-scale infrastructure projects without straining their balance sheets. Similar deals have emerged across the AI sector, including a $15 billion data centre joint venture in Texas backed by Blue Owl Capital for OpenAI, which is also working with SoftBank and Oracle on a proposed $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative.
