Blue Owl Eyes New Deals as It Pushes Deeper Into AI Boom

Billionaire Marc Lipschultz, ever eager for finance’s risky new thing, has made his publicly traded firm into a critical cog within AI. Investors seem unsettled.

If there are growing worries about the scale of money pouring into AI, word of that hasn’t reached Marc Lipschultz. He is co-CEO of Blue Owl Capital, a publicly traded investment firm that has struck a series of huge AI data center deals. And he’s gearing up for far more of them.

Right now, he says Blue Owl is working on more than $100 billion in new investments to provide both equity and debt financing to data center projects around the country. That binge would follow what was a very busy stretch last year—when Blue Owl made at least $5.6 billion of equity investments into data centers and raised $64 billion in debt for those projects, according to internal figures.

In Texas, Blue Owl is in talks with data center developer Crusoe about funding a third phase of construction at the Abilene campus, which is part of OpenAI’s Stargate project, said people with knowledge of the discussions, which haven’t been previously reported. The site is already one of the world’s biggest data centers. The expansion would increase its power capacity by more than 50% to 1.9 gigawatts and increase the number of pricey natural gas turbines fivefold. Blue Owl is also talking to Google about providing financing for the company’s data center projects, said people with knowledge of those discussions, which are also previously unreported.