AI Meets Aggressive Accounting at Meta’s Gigantic New Data Center

2025-11-24 10:30

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AI Meets Aggressive Accounting at Meta’s Gigantic New Data Center

By Jonathan WeilShareResizeListen(2 min)What really happens after you hit enter on that AI prompt? WSJ’s Joanna Stern heads inside a data center to trace the journey and then grills up some steaks to ...

Jonathan Weil

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What really happens after you hit enter on that AI prompt? WSJ’s Joanna Stern heads inside a data center to trace the journey and then grills up some steaks to show just how much energy it takes to make an AI image and video. Photo: David Hall

It seems like a marvel of financial engineering: Meta Platforms META 2.34%increase; green up pointing triangle is building a $27 billion data center in Louisiana, financed with debt, and neither the data center nor the debt will be on its own balance sheet.

That outcome looks too good to be true, and it probably is.