Meta has announced that its Hyperion mega-data center cluster in Richland Parish, Louisiana, is now planned with a total capacity of 5 gigawatts and an investment exceeding $500 billion.
This investment figure is significantly higher than the $270 billion disclosed last October, when Meta partnered with Blue Owl Capital to form a joint venture for the project's construction and operation.
Meta, along with cloud giants like Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), and Amazon, is racing to establish facilities in various states, leveraging local tax breaks and energy incentives to capitalize on the AI computing infrastructure boom.
On January 9, 2026, construction was underway at the site of Meta's planned 5-gigawatt Hyperion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana.
Benefiting from generous support policies introduced by the Louisiana state government, Meta's Hyperion supercomputing data center project in a rural area of the state has seen a major expansion in scale and total investment.
In an official blog post on Monday, Meta stated that this facility in Richland Parish, which will become its largest data center globally upon completion, is planned for a computing capacity of 5 gigawatts with an overall investment surpassing $500 billion. This contrasts with the officially disclosed investment of just $270 billion last October, when Meta teamed up with Blue Owl Capital to form a joint venture for the project, initially planned for only 2 gigawatts of capacity.
Meta is advancing a multi-hundred-billion-dollar AI computing infrastructure build-out. Major cloud providers like Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), and Amazon are all vying to take advantage of tax rebates and special energy partnership incentives offered by states competing to attract AI industry investment.
In late 2024, Louisiana's Republican Governor Jeff Landry signed legislation granting data centers completed before 2029 a 20-year sales tax exemption, aiming to attract Meta's investment. Landry is scheduled to hold a press conference in Baton Rouge on Monday.
In an interview last year, Landry stated, "I come from a business background. This comprehensive support package is a net positive overall. For local governments and state finances, the final bottom-line benefit is what matters most; the other details are not important."
To build sufficient AI computing infrastructure and meet market demand, Meta has chosen to significantly expand this project. Previously, Meta's AI chief and head of the Superintelligence Lab, Alexander Wang, unveiled two major new large language models, helping drive the company's stock to its best week since early 2024. Investors have been eager for Meta to translate its massive AI investments into profitable returns.
In Monday's blog post, Meta stated, "The company will cover 100% of the costs for the electricity, water, and infrastructure needed to operate the data center, with no costs passed on to local residents."
The company indicated that since construction began on the Louisiana project in December 2024, Meta has awarded over $1.6 billion in contracts to local businesses.
Meta stated, "With this expansion, we will invest an additional $1 billion+ to upgrade local public infrastructure, including roads, water, and wastewater systems." The expansion has not yet announced any new financial partners.
The project's initial estimated total investment was only $100 billion. Roughly six months later, CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on Facebook revealing that this supercomputing cluster, named Hyperion, "will scale to 5GW over the next several years."
Unlike traditional data centers, supercomputing clusters densely deploy cutting-edge hardware like graphics cards optimized for AI computations.
Zuckerberg wrote, "Meta's Superintelligence Lab will have industry-leading compute capacity, with more compute per researcher than any other company in the industry."
A Meta spokesperson revealed that the Hyperion project is expected to complete 2 gigawatts of capacity by 2030, but there is no definitive timeline yet for the full 5-gigawatt build-out.
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