Facebook parent Meta Platforms is looking to raise some $29 billion (£21bn) through private capital firms to finance the construction and expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) data centres in the US, the Financial Times reported.

Large credit investors including Apollo Global Management, KKR, Brookfield, Carlyle and Pimco are involved in advanced talks to raise $3bn in equity and a further $26bn of debt, in what would be one of the largest private fundraisings of its kind, the paper said.

Meta is still debating how to structure the massive debt raising and could also look to raise more capital, the FT said, citing unnamed people.

Private funding

The social media firm has reportedly been working with advisers at Morgan Stanley to arrange financing and is looking for ways to make the debt more easily tradeable once it is issued.

Meta and other large tech players have been working with major money managers to expand their access to the massive computing power required by generative AI services while sharing the costs and risk.

Private capital firm Blue Owl is, for instance, helping to fund a $15bn joint venture to construct data centres for OpenAI in Texas.

The deal with Meta involving Apollo and others was reported by Bloomberg in February, with talks at the time focusing on a figure of roughly $35bn.

Meta has been ramping up spending on AI-related investments this year as it seeks to catch up with rivals including Google and OpenAI.

Earlier this month those investments expanded to include a $15bn investment in AI data-labelling start-up Scale AI along with hiring Scale’s chief executive Alexandr Wang to lead a new “superintelligence” team.

AI expansion

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has personally been trying to poach OpenAI researchers, with OpenAI chief Sam Altman claiming in a podcast that Meta was offering engineers $100m sign-on bonuses.

In May Meta raised its capital expenditure forecast by as much as 10 percent to between $64bn and $72bn citing additional data centre investments and increases in the expected cost of infrastructure hardware.

This month Meta said it would buy the entire output of an Illinois nuclear plant for two decades to power AI data centres, in its first nuclear deal.