Meta Platforms is counting on Wall Street to pick up the tab for a massive artificial-intelligence spending spree. It picked a time when lenders’ wallets are starting to feel light.Construction is under way on Meta Platforms’ El Paso, Texas, data-center complex.A borrowing binge this year for big tech companies is giving debt investors fatigue and pushing up the cost of capital across the industry. Lenders on Monday demanded higher yields on bonds from a new data-center project in El Paso, Texas, leased by Meta compared with a similar project last year. Concerns about more AI-adjacent debt coming, especially after an aggressive spending forecast from Alphabet’s Google last week sparked a selloff in tech stocks and helped push down prices of bonds from companies like Microsoft and Amazon.com in recent days.The supply of new bonds this year from AI companies already reached $270 billion in early July, almost double what was raised in all of 2025, according to Bank of America Global Research. Despite the investor indigestion, the data-center boom looks poised to create even more new debt, even if it ends up being more expensive, since no player wants to risk falling behind in the AI arms race.Meta executives have told bankers and fund managers that it will need to raise hundreds of billions of dollars to support its AI infrastructure build-out and is currently in talks with other firms like Blackstone for additional funds, people familiar with the matter said. Meanwhile, Nvidia is in talks with OpenAI to provide a roughly $250 billion backstop to help finance the construction of a giant data-center project in Ohio, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.“The market is expecting the build to continue,” said Neha Khoda, head of U.S. credit strategy at Bank of America. “Just at a higher price point.”Take Monday’s sale of $12.55 billion in notes tied to Meta’s El Paso project, which is 80% owned by funds managed by BlackRock. Yields on the offering from Sopaipilla Investor, a holding company that owns BlackRock’s portion of the project, were about 2.875 percentage points above the 10-year Treasury note, or 7.5%, people familiar with the offering said. Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan bankers led the deal, which was for bonds that are set to mature in 2048.Existing bonds tied to a similar Meta project in Louisiana were trading at a yield about half a percentage point lower than the new deal’s interest rate on Monday.More deals tied to Meta are likely. The social-networking company has been aggressively locking up future data-center capacity and has issued several requests for proposals on additional projects related to real estate, energy and other AI infrastructure, the people said.Dina Powell McCormick, a Goldman Sachs veteran and former Trump White House official who joined Meta as president and vice chairman in January, is helping to lead the effort. In recent months, she and other Meta executives have met with BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman and Jon Gray and Brookfield’s Chief Executive Bruce Flatt, according to people familiar with the meetings.Powell McCormick co-leads, with Daniel Gross and Santosh Janardhan, a team called Meta Compute, a division that was charged by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg to map out the company’s strategy to secure enormous amounts of computing power. They work with Chief Financial Officer Susan Li on the financing.Borrowing overdriveFor years, Meta had little need to borrow, thanks to a highly profitable advertising business that gushed cash. It wasn’t until 2022, a decade after Meta’s initial public offering, that the company issued its first corporate bond.In the past nine months, its borrowing went into overdrive. In October, Meta raised $30 billion, roughly doubling its debt load, in one of the year’s largest corporate bond offerings. The company followed that up in April with an additional $25 billion in new bond sales.Meta also has gotten creative about keeping billions of dollars of borrowing off its balance sheet. The Hyperion data-center project in Louisiana was structured as a joint venture with investment firm Blue Owl Capital. Funds managed by Blue Owl invested about $3 billion into the project and received an 80% ownership stake. A holding company owning that stake, Beignet Investor, then issued $27 billion in bonds to finance the construction of the roughly two-gigawatt complex.For both the Beignet and Sopaipilla bonds, Meta provided a so-called residual-value guarantee that makes bondholders whole if Meta opted not to renew its lease or terminate it early. That helped each offering get investment-grade ratings. Sopaipilla received an A+ rating from S&P and a AA- rating from Fitch.Data-center developers have gone on their own borrowing binges to build capacity for Meta.Meta recently signed a long-term lease to occupy a more-than-three-gigawatt facility in Shippingport, Pa., being developed by Aligned Data Centers, a digital infrastructure landlord and operator that a BlackRock-led consortium acquired in a $20 billion deal last week. Banks are providing a roughly $10 billion project-finance package for the site’s construction, people familiar with the matter said.Wall Street bankers have told clients they aren’t sure the interest rates will ease soon—an issue that has big AI companies reassessing their estimates for how much the infrastructure build-out will cost.Just like how extreme demand for materials and semiconductors has sent data center construction costs soaring, extreme demand for capital is pushing up interest rates.Still, there’s little appetite to wait and see. Plenty of investors are willing to lend at the right price, and AI companies currently favor paying up now versus risking any construction delay.Write to Peter Rudegeair at peter.rudegeair@wsj.com, Jack Pitcher at jack.pitcher@wsj.com and AnnaMaria Andriotis at annamaria.andriotis@wsj.com