Meta’s sprawling AI data center in rural Louisiana just got a massive cash infusion, but not everyone close to the project is celebrating.
The company said Monday its Hyperion supercluster in Richland Parish will expand to a 5-gigawatt facility costing more than $50 billion, making it Meta’s largest data center and one of the biggest AI infrastructure projects in the world. The site was earlier projected to deliver more than 2 gigawatts of compute capacity, the kind of power needed to train the large language models behind tools like ChatGPT. When construction began in 2024, the price tag was $10 billion.
That means the cost of the project has quintupled in less than two years, largely thanks to deep-pocketed private capital and the state’s willingness to forgo tax revenue to land the deal. In late 2024, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed a law making data centers built before 2029 sales-tax-exempt for 20 years.
But missing out on tax revenue doesn’t appear to bother Landry. In a Monday statement, he said since the deal was signed, the state has “secured more than $150 billion in new investment by creating an environment where companies can move quickly and build at scale.”
Some business owners appear to be on the same page, claiming their workers are earning more with additional people and resources.
