Meta Ups Investment To $50B For Its Largest Data Center Project

Social media giant Meta has expanded its already massive data center development in Richland Parish, Louisiana. 

The company announced Monday that its Hyperion data center campus will have 5 gigawatts of computing capacity and bring more than $50B of investment to the region.

A rendering of Meta’s Hyperion campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana

That is up from the original $10B plan for the project, the largest artificial intelligence data center cluster in Meta’s pipeline and one of the biggest in the world. The total expected cost for the campus, including the computing chips that will go inside, could surpass $250B, Bloomberg reported, citing an anonymous source.

Hyperion is being built on a 4,000-acre site in Richland Parish, a rural area in Northeast Louisiana. The project will support more than 7,500 jobs at peak construction and 1,000 roles once operational, according to Meta. 

Blue Owl Capital owns an 80% stake in the project and brought in billions from Wall Street to help fund construction, Bloomberg reported. 

Meta, which said in November it would invest $600B in U.S. infrastructure and jobs over the next three years, has 33 total data centers either completed or under development. Other hyperscalers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are also racing to build infrastructure to meet the demand created by rapid advancements in AI technology. 

Hyperion was originally planned as a 2 GW data center. It is now planned to have 5 GW of computing power, with more than 2 GW serving the campus’ broader electrical needs, Bloomberg reported. 

The project should reach 2 GW by 2030, but there is no timeline for when the project will reach the full 5 GW, CNBC reported. 

Meta’s planned $50B investment for Hyperion will support an agreement saving Entergy Louisiana customers $2.65B over 20 years, the announcement said. 

Meta has contracted more than $1.6B with Louisiana businesses since construction began in December 2024, and it said the project is already reverberating across the economy. 

“This year, teachers in Richland Parish, Louisiana received yearly bonus checks that were 400% higher than last year, a result of increased tax revenues caused by our data center project,” Meta said in its Monday announcement.

Meanwhile, Meta is facing scrutiny over a contamination incident during construction of a 715K SF data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

A rare and potentially dangerous bacterium called Cupriavidus gilardii was found in the city’s wastewater and traced back to a discharge by a contractor on the $800M data center project, the Daily Mail reported. Meta said in a statement its contractor immediately stopped discharging industrial wastewater and began hauling it off-site.