Meta is in advanced talks with leading private investment firms to raise a staggering $29 billion to fund its aggressive push into artificial intelligence, signaling the tech giant’s largest off-balance-sheet financing effort to date.
According to people familiar with the matter, Meta is targeting $3 billion in equity and $26 billion in debt to finance a vast expansion of data centers across the United States. The company is working with investment banking giant Morgan Stanley to structure the deal, which would be one of the largest private capital fundraisings in corporate history.
Private equity titans including Apollo Global Management, KKR, Brookfield, Carlyle, and Pimco are involved in the discussions. The final structure of the debt financing is still under consideration, with Meta and its advisers weighing how to make the debt more easily tradeable given its unprecedented scale.
Meta declined to comment on the negotiations, as did the firms involved.
The initiative underscores the intense competition among Big Tech players to build the computational infrastructure needed to power next-generation AI models. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is determined to position the company as a global leader in AI, even as it lags rivals like OpenAI and Google in terms of technological breakthroughs.
In recent months, Meta has made bold moves to catch up: investing $15 billion in ScaleAI, hiring its CEO Alexandr Wang to lead a new “superintelligence” division, and poaching AI researchers from OpenAI with reported $100 million sign-on bonuses.
Zuckerberg’s AI ambitions have already had major financial implications. Meta raised its 2025 capital expenditure guidance to between $64 billion and $72 billion in May, citing increased data center investment and rising infrastructure hardware costs.
To power its expanding AI infrastructure, Meta announced earlier this month it would purchase the output of an Illinois nuclear power plant for the next 20 years — its first nuclear energy deal. The company has also struck multiple clean energy agreements with Invenergy.
Rather than fund the expansion directly through traditional corporate bonds or loans, Meta is leveraging the growing appetite among private asset managers for alternative structures. These are often set up as joint ventures or special purpose vehicles, allowing corporations to access massive pools of capital while keeping the resulting liabilities off their balance sheets.
Such arrangements offer mutual benefits: Meta avoids putting strain on its credit ratings, while private capital firms — many of which own or are tied to insurers and annuity providers — gain access to long-term, high-quality investments with strong cash flow potential.
The strategy echoes recent deals by other tech giants. Last year, Apollo struck an $11 billion deal with Intel to finance semiconductor fabs in Ireland, receiving a stake in a dedicated business unit in return.
Meta’s ambitious $29 billion fundraising comes as competition heats up across the AI landscape. OpenAI is pursuing a $15 billion data center venture with Blue Owl and exploring a separate $500 billion project alongside Oracle and SoftBank.
