Meta’s 5 GW Hyperion data center under construction in Richland Parish, Louisiana, January 9, 2026.
Courtesy of Meta
meta A massive Hyperion data center project in rural Louisiana is becoming much larger and more expensive with significant support from the state government.
Meta’s largest data center, the site in Richland Parish, Louisiana, will be a 5GW facility costing more than $50 billion, the company said in a blog post Monday. This is meta and blue owl capital has formed a joint venture to help build and manage the facility, which was originally planned as a 2GW data center.
Meta and hyperscalers become rivals as Meta pursues hundreds of billions of dollars in artificial intelligence expansion microsoft, alphabet and Amazon It is taking advantage of tax rebates and energy deals offered by states vying to get a piece of the AI boom.
In late 2024, Louisiana’s Republican Governor Jeff Landry signed into law a 20-year sales tax exemption for data centers built before 2029 as part of an effort to court meth in the state, CNBC previously reported. Landry is scheduled to host a press event in Baton Rouge on Monday.
“I’m a businessman,” Landry said in an interview with CNBC last year. “What we know is that if you look at the overall comprehensive package here, it’s a surplus. It doesn’t matter to me how it ultimately benefits local governments or the state.”
Meta is expanding the project with the aim of building enough AI infrastructure to meet demand. The announcement comes after Meta had its best week on the stock market since early 2024 following the release of two major AI models under the leadership of Meta Superintelligence Lab Director and Head of AI Alexander Wang. Investors had expected the company to start seeing profits from its large-scale AI investments.
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Mehta said in a post on Monday that the company “covers the entire cost of the energy, water and related infrastructure used by our data centers, so consumers are not paying any costs.” Since construction of the Louisiana data center began in December 2024, local companies have received more than $1.6 billion in contracts from Meta, the company said.
“This expansion will invest more than $1 billion in regional infrastructure improvements, including roads, water and wastewater systems,” Mehta said in the post. The company did not announce a financial partner for the expansion.
When the project began, the estimated price tag was $10 billion. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post about six months later that the supercluster, dubbed Hyperion, “can scale up to 5GW over several years.” Unlike traditional data centers, superclusters are packed with graphics processing units and associated cutting-edge hardware tailored for AI workloads.
“The Meta-Superintelligence Lab will have industry-leading levels of computing and the highest compute per researcher ever,” Zuckerberg wrote.
A Meta spokesperson told CNBC that the Hyperion project should reach 2GW by 2030, but there is no timeline for when the full 5GW project will be completed.
Note: Meta rebound should last until July.
