Private lenders have financed a lot of things over the past decade — leveraged buyouts, software company acquisitions, commercial real estate bridges. A $27 billion initiative to build a data center campus the size of a small city belongs to a different category of transaction entirely.

Blue Owl Capital structured financing for a Louisiana campus covering approximately 2 gigawatts of capacity, initially leased 100% to Meta on a triple net lease basis. According to the firm’s positioning materials, this is the largest known data center campus in the world and the largest known single data center project to date (https://www.blueowl.com/news). The deal moved through Blue Owl’s digital infrastructure platform, which sits within its broader Real Assets business.

The deal in numbers

Scale becomes clearer against the overall market. Blue Owl Capital leased 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity in 2025, against total global leasing of 11.3 gigawatts — roughly 40% of everything leased worldwide that year. Separately, the firm raised nearly $55 billion in data center debt financing during 2025, a figure that surpasses the total quantum raised since the firm’s founding (https://www.blueowl.com/news).

Bank estimates cited in Blue Owl’s materials put the firm’s share of the data center debt market above 50% for 2025. The Meta campus sits at the peak of that activity, both in absolute size and in what it demonstrates about executing at a scale few private lenders can match.

Why private lenders are financing hyperscalers

Hyperscalers — the large technology companies building and operating global data center infrastructure — need enormous capital to fund construction and expansion. Traditional bank lending faces hard limits, both in balance sheet capacity and in appetite for long-duration, high-capital infrastructure commitments.

Private lenders with large permanent capital bases can take on the size and duration that banks often will not. Blue Owl’s triple net lease structure passes operating costs to the tenant, reduces risk at the asset level, and produces long-term, predictable income for investors. For Meta, the arrangement provides certainty of capital without the balance sheet burden of owning the real estate outright.

Blue Owl’s position in the market

Blue Owl Capital has described its digital infrastructure team as having partnered with large hyperscalers for more than a decade, predating the current wave of AI-driven data center demand. Financing agreements of this size require deep relationships, technical fluency in how these facilities are designed and built, and a counterparty that can move at the pace of a construction timeline.

The firm’s positioning materials note that its team has developed “some of the largest data centers in the U.S., and now globally.” Whether measured by gigawatts leased, debt volume arranged, or transaction count, data center financing has become one of the most active segments across the entire Blue Owl platform.

Continue: Blue Owl Capital Earnings Call Highlights Robust Growth