Meta raises $30B in bonds, invests $14B in AI data center push

Meta Platforms raised $30 billion in its largest bond sale and committed $14 billion to a joint venture with BlackRock for an El Paso data center, accelerating an AI infrastructure buildout that will test investor tolerance for rising capital costs. The spending spree, announced July 28, comes as Meta builds its first Canadian campus near Edmonton — a $9.17 billion, one-gigawatt facility that will be powered by a dedicated 932-megawatt gas-fired plant.

"This is a capital-intensive arms race, and Meta intends to stay at the front," said Scott Burrows, chief executive officer of Capital Power Corp., which signed a 250-megawatt energy supply agreement with Meta for the Alberta development. "The long-term revenue visibility from hyperscale contracts makes these investments attractive for power suppliers as well."

The $30 billion bond sale, Meta's largest ever, will fund data center construction, AI model training infrastructure, and related capital expenditures. The El Paso joint venture with BlackRock, one of the largest single-project data center commitments on record, adds to Meta's growing portfolio of AI-dedicated computing capacity. Global hyperscalers are expected to invest between $700 billion and $800 billion on data center infrastructure in 2026, up from about $400 billion in 2025, according to industry estimates.

Meta's Canadian campus in Sturgeon County, Alberta, will use closed-loop liquid cooling with dry cooling, resulting in no operational water use for the cooling system — a key concession to local concerns about water strain. The company has pledged to match the facility's electricity consumption with 100% clean and renewable energy through procurement contracts, though the dedicated gas plant will still burn natural gas to power the campus directly. The Greenlight Electricity Centre, backed by Pembina Pipeline and Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners, will consume about 150 million cubic feet of natural gas daily and can expand to 1,864 megawatts if Meta adds a second phase.

The Power Infrastructure Play

The buildout is creating winners beyond Meta itself. Capital Power, which operates roughly 12 gigawatts of generation capacity across 35 facilities, has roughly two gigawatts of underutilized infrastructure available for additional data center contracts. The company has also partnered with Apollo Global Management on a $3 billion investment partnership targeting U.S. natural gas assets to support grid demands from AI computing.

Hammond Power Solutions, a transformer manufacturer that joined the S&P/TSX Composite Index in June, reported first-quarter revenue of $265 million, up 31.5% from a year earlier, with its order backlog growing 94.6%. The company completed a $365 million acquisition of AEG Power Solutions in June to capture higher-margin, system-level demand from data center customers.

What It Means for Investors

Meta shares have rallied this year as the company demonstrated that AI investments can drive advertising revenue growth through improved targeting and user engagement. But the scale of the current spending cycle — $30 billion in debt, $14 billion in a single joint venture, and billions more in Canadian infrastructure — raises the bar for returns. The company's data center capital expenditures are now running at levels that would have been unthinkable for any technology company outside the hyperscaler tier just three years ago.

For investors, the key metric to watch is whether Meta's AI-driven ad revenue growth outpaces the depreciation and operating costs of this new infrastructure. The Greenlight plant is expected to begin commercial service in the second half of 2030, meaning the payoff from these investments remains years away. Nvidia, whose GPUs power most AI training workloads, stands to benefit from Meta's expansion regardless of whether Meta's own returns materialize on schedule.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.