Meta Doubles Louisiana Data Center Plan to 5 Gigawatts, Pushing Investment Past $50 Billion
Meta said on Monday that its Hyperion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, will expand from an original target of more than 2 gigawatts to 5 gigawatts of compute capacity, taking the total investment in the project above $50 billion. The new figure matches a number President Donald Trump had thrown out last year, when the project was still in its early stages.
The Louisiana campus is designed to train the large language models behind tools like ChatGPT, and the jump in scale suggests Meta's internal demand forecasts have moved sharply upward since the project broke ground in December 2024. The company said local Louisiana businesses have already received more than $1.6 billion in contracts, and it plans to spend over $1 billion on roads, water, and wastewater systems in the area. Teachers in Richland Parish recently saw annual bonuses climb as high as $50,000, a 400% increase over the previous year, thanks to the surge in tax revenue from the data center construction.
That local windfall has not silenced critics. Earthjustice, a U.S. environmental law group, had asked regulators to investigate the project's financing structure, arguing that utility customers could end up footing the bill if Meta walked away before the utility recovered its costs. The request was denied earlier this year. The pushback is part of a wider pattern, with New York recently becoming the first state to impose a data center moratorium, and with Reuters reporting that pollution from Elon Musk's unpermitted xAI power project in Memphis has fallen hardest on Black communities.
Meta is pouring billions into infrastructure across the country, part of a three-year, $600 billion pledge that now spans 32 data centers globally, 28 of them in the United States. The Richland Parish expansion alone will require power supply at a scale equivalent to several nuclear reactors, and the company has not yet detailed how it plans to secure that much electricity while keeping its climate commitments on track.
BuiltWorld AI Operational Take: A 5-gigawatt single-site campus resets the baseline for what hyperscale infrastructure looks like, and it puts enormous pressure on the local supply chain for skilled electrical labour, switchgear, and backup generation. The bigger story for project teams is the widening gap between the economic benefits Meta can offer a rural parish and the growing national backlash against data center sprawl. Managing community relations in Richland Parish will be as important as managing turbine deliveries, because a project this size cannot afford to become the next poster child for anti-data-center legislation.