Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition…Meta’s giant Hyperion data center gets even bigger…OpenAI and Amazon talk about an alliance…Is the AI bubble popping because AI is actually working?…AI makes inroads at the Super Bowl (at least in the ads).
I’m in a bit of recovery mode today, having just returned from several days in northeast Louisiana visiting Meta’s massive AI data center site, known as Hyperion, for a feature story I’m reporting.
I’ve been scouring the thesaurus, trying to land on the right word to describe just how large, loud, and chaotic this construction site is. Colossal? Mammoth? Sprawling? Let’s put it this way: it takes a while just to drive the length of the site—it stretches roughly five miles from top to bottom.
And during that drive, I discovered that Hyperion is getting even bigger. While the expansion had long been suspected—and was something of an open secret among some locals—I confirmed that Meta has quietly purchased roughly 1,400 additional acres, an area nearly twice the size of Manhattan’s Central Park, adjacent to its already-mega 2,250-acre campus. I also observed active construction underway on the newly acquired land—when I wasn’t worrying about getting mowed down by the endless parade of 18-wheelers hauling materials in and around the site.
