Meta has formed a $27 billion joint venture (JV) to fund the build-out of a large-scale AI data center campus in Louisiana.

Facebook's parent company has set up the JV, which will develop and own the Hyperion data center campus in Louisiana, with funds managed by Blue Owl Capital.

Blue Owl funds will own an 80 percent interest in the joint venture, while Meta will retain the remaining 20 percent ownership. Meta will provide construction management and property management services for the project. 

The companies have committed to fund their share of the approximately $27bn in total development costs for the buildings and power, cooling, and connectivity infrastructure at the campus.

Meta is set to lease all of the facilities of the campus once construction is complete. These lease agreements will have a four-year initial term with options to extend.

However, Meta also provided the joint venture with a guarantee for the first 16 years of operations, where the social media firm would make a cash payment to the JV upon non-renewal or termination of a lease.

The social media giant contributed land and construction-in-progress assets for the campus development that were previously classified as held-for-sale.

Blue Owl Capital has made a cash contribution of approximately $7bn to the joint venture, and Meta received a one-time distribution from the joint venture in the amount of approximately $3bn. A portion of capital raised by Blue Owl will be funded by debt issued to PIMCO and select other bond investors through a private securities offering.

Meta has around 30 data center campuses in operation or development globally. News on the 2GW Louisiana development – now known as Hyperion - first broke back in November. In December, the firm announced its intention to construct the mega campus on 2,250 acres between the municipalities of Rayville and Delhi, about 30 miles (48.2km) east of Monroe.

In its most recent earnings call, the company's CFO, Susan Li, said Meta expects to finance a large share of its build-out itself, but is also “exploring ways to work with financial partners to co-develop data centers.”

In July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the company planned to spend "hundreds of billions of dollars" on data centers for its AI efforts, and set up a new 'superintelligence' unit.

"We're actually building several multi-gigawatt clusters. We're calling the first one Prometheus, and it's coming online in 2026," Zuckerberg said at the time. "We're also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years. We're building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan."

Renderings of the Hyperion campus suggest up to nine buildings totaling some four million sq ft (371,610 sqm) are planned, with construction expected to be completed in phases through to 2030. At least part of the project will likely be powered via natural gas.

News that Meta was looking to secure a large amount of funding for the project surfaced back in August, and again earlier this month. The company recently announced it would sell some $2bn of its in-development data center portfolio to a third party, possibly as part of this deal.