Meta convinces Blue Owl to cut $30B check for its Hyperion AI super cluster (www.theregister.com)

Meta has persuaded private-equity firm Blue Owl to underwrite the vast Hyperion datacenter project in Richland Parish, Louisiana, with roughly $27 billion of debt and $1.5 billion of equity financing (reported overall as about $30B). The Morgan Stanley-brokered deal leaves Blue Owl carrying the debt — a fully amortizing facility maturing in 2049 — while Meta retains a 20% stake and will build, operate and lease the campus, which is slated to come online in 2029. Structuring the financing off Meta’s balance sheet lets the company scale massive infrastructure without adding that debt to its corporate books. Technically, Hyperion is enormous: a four‑million‑square‑foot campus now targeted to deliver up to ~5 gigawatts of compute capacity (initial buildouts around 2.2 GW), making it one of the largest single datacenter projects of the AI boom. The site requires significant power expansion — Meta has commissioned Entergy to build a new natural‑gas plant with three combined‑cycle turbines generating over 2.2 GW — underscoring how energy sourcing, grid upgrades, and capital intensity are central bottlenecks for hyperscale AI. For the AI/ML community this signals continued aggressive capacity buildup (alongside Meta’s other gigawatt sites), novel financing models to de‑risk balance sheets, and growing pressure on power infrastructure and supply chains for servers and networking.