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SoftBank and Meta are making major strides in their push to jumpstart multi-billion dollar data center projects.
SoftBank, the Japanese investment holding company led by Masayoshi Son, is buying an electric vehicle plant in Ohio from major Apple supplier Foxconn, according to Bloomberg.
It’s a notable step for the company, which has been struggling to plan out the finances of its massive Stargate project – a joint effort by SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX to invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure across the country.
Meta, meanwhile, has tapped US bond giant PIMCO and alternative asset manager Blue Owl to lead its $29 billion financing for data center expansion in rural Louisiana, a source familiar with the matter told The Post.
PIMCO will handle about $26 billion of debt while Blue Owl will contribute about $3 billion in equity, the source said.
SoftBank, Foxconn, Meta, PIMCO and Blue Owl did not immediately respond to The Post’s requests for comments.
Tech companies are racing to build powerful data centers across the nation, especially as President Trump calls for increased investment in the country.
SoftBank had approached Foxconn for help with its plan to build more massive data centers in the US, people familiar with the matter Bloomberg.
The sale of the EV plant is a result of those talks, according to the report.
Earlier this week, Hon Hai Precision Industry – Foxconn’s flagship unit – said it had agreed to sell the facility for $375 million to Crescent Dune LLC, though it did not disclose the company behind that entity.
Hon Hai’s stake in the data center project would be a major win for SoftBank. The Foxconn unit was an investor in SoftBank’s first venture capital fund.
The unit would operate the plant and use the facility for its own AI server manufacturing business, and perhaps to host a data center, according to a Bloomberg report.
SoftBank and Foxconn earlier this year invested $735 million each into a joint venture to build data centers in the US.
It is not clear whether SoftBank’s investment in that partnership includes its payment for the EV plant.
Meta has been working with Morgan Stanley to raise funds and find partners to back its AI push, according to Bloomberg.
The social media giant said last week that it planned to offload about $2 billion in data center assets as part of a strategy to share the costs of building these expensive facilities.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg had pledged hundreds of billions of dollars toward the effort in July when he announced the company’s superintelligence unit.
The firm’s first multi-gigawatt data center, called Prometheus, is expected to come online next year, Zuckerberg said last month.
Another planned facility called Hyperion will be able to scale up to 5 gigawatts over the next coming years, he added.
As data center expansion ramps up across the country, some US residents are pushing back – outraged over the massive water and energy use needed to maintain these facilities.
Local officials in Tucson, Ariz., effectively killed a $3.6 billion Amazon-linked data center project this week when they unanimously voted to pause discussions with its developers, according to local news reports.
That vote required all staff to stop work on “Project Blue,” a data center slated to be built on 290 acres of land in Pima County.
“AWS has previously engaged in standard due diligence processes in Arizona, like we do in any geographic location we consider building and operating our infrastructure,” an Amazon spokesperson told The Post.
“We do not have any commitments or agreements in place to develop this project.”
While the county approved the sale of the land, the project still requires approval of its development plans.
Two in-person meetings about the project drew in crowds of 800 to 1,000 enraged residents, who protested the massive amounts of water and energy needed to power the data center, according to the Tucson Sentinel.
The project was expected to generate $250 million in tax revenue and create 3,000 temporary construction jobs – along with about 180 permanent positions earning an average salary of $64,000, according to the developers. Their only contractual obligation, however, was to hire just 75 workers.
