Who's financing Meta's massive AI data center?

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  NPR.

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  This is the Indicator from Planet Money.

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  I'm Waylon Wong.

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  And I'm Darian Woods.

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  There is a transformation taking place in northeastern Louisiana.

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  Trucks rumble down two-lane highways en route to a massive construction site.

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  When the project is completed in a few years,

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  this rural landscape will be home to a cluster of buildings totalling four million square feet.

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  These buildings will be tech company Meta's largest AI data center.

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  Meta calls the project Hyperion and says it will be able to channel up to five gigawatts of energy.

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  That's enough to power five million homes by one estimate.

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  But in this case, it will be powering Meta's AI ambitions.

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  This data center comes with a roughly $30 billion price tag.

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  So where did Meta get the money from?

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  Today on the show,

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  we explain the unusual financing behind this project and why these kinds of deals are raising fears of a potential AI bubble.

• 01:15

  Our AI zeitgeist comes with some new vocabulary.

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  One of these words is hyperscaler.

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  This can refer to the corporations that provide cloud services like Amazon,

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  or it can refer to the massive data centers these companies run.

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