Social media giant Meta is close to securing nearly $30 billion for a gigawatt-scale data center project in the US.

Citing people with knowledge of the matter, Bloomberg reports Meta has selected Pacific Investment Management Co. (Pimco) and Blue Owl Capital Inc. to lead a $29 billion financing for its data center expansion in rural Louisiana.

Pimco is expected to lead a $26 billion debt portion of the financing, while Blue Owl is reportedly providing $3 billion of equity.

Meta has been working with Morgan Stanley to raise funds. Apollo Global Management Inc. and KKR & Co. were said to be vying to lead the financing until the final round of talks.

None of the above companies provided a comment to Bloomberg.

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, 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."

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 east of Monroe.

Renderings of the campus suggest up to nine buildings totaling some 4 million sq ft (371,610 sqm) are being planned, with construction expected to be completed in phases through 2030. At least part of the project will likely be powered via natural gas.

The company recently announced it would sell some $2 billion of its in-development data center portfolio to a third party.

Meta is building out at such a pace that the company is placing IT hardware in large temporary tents in some locations.

Blue Owl has approximately $192 billion in assets under management. Not historically known for its data center investments, the firm has made a number of large-scale moves into the sector in the last year. The company recently closed a $7 billion digital infrastructure fund. It also recently acquired IPI Partners, taking over Stack Infrastructure and US regional Edge firm Radius DC. It also has a $5 billion joint venture with Chirisa Technology Parks (CTP) and PowerHouse Data Centers to develop data centers across the US, mostly for AI cloud firm CoreWeave.

Pimco is an American investment management firm owned by Allianz Group and has a large European real estate platform. The company launched a new European data center platform, Apto, in 2023.