TL;DR
Meta’s Hyperion AI data centre campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, now carries a projected cost exceeding $200 billion. The facility spans nearly 4,000 acres, will require 10 gas-fired power plants generating 7+ gigawatts, and is financed through a $27 billion off-balance-sheet Wall Street deal.
Meta is building the most expensive single piece of private infrastructure in American history. Hyperion, the company’s AI data centre campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, now carries a projected cost of more than $200 billion, a figure that has grown steadily since the project was first announced at $10 billion in December 2024. The campus spans nearly 4,000 acres, will require 10 gas-fired power plants generating more than 7 gigawatts of electricity, and is being financed through a $27 billion Wall Street deal that allows Meta to keep most of the debt off its own balance sheet. It is, by any measure, a bet that the returns from AI infrastructure will justify expenditure on a scale that no private company has ever attempted.
The scale of the project
Hyperion will consist of up to nine buildings across a site that has expanded repeatedly since Meta first acquired land in Richland Parish. The company purchased an additional 1,400 acres earlier this year, bringing the total campus to roughly four times the size of Manhattan’s Central Park. The facility is designed to deliver 5 gigawatts of computational power, with an additional 2.5 gigawatts allocated to campus support systems, cooling, and infrastructure. It is expected to become operational by 2030.
To power the campus, Entergy Louisiana is building 10 gas-fired power plants, tripling the three originally planned. Meta reached a new agreement with Entergy in March 2026 for seven additional plants generating 5.2 gigawatts, on top of the initial three. Meta will pay for the construction of all 10 plants and has committed to funding 2.5 gigawatts of new renewable energy resources, 240 miles of new transmission lines, and battery energy storage systems. The two companies are also exploring the potential use of nuclear power for future capacity.
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The project is expected to create more than 500 permanent operational jobs and employ more than 5,000 construction workers at peak activity. Meta has committed $300 million to local infrastructure improvements, including roads, water systems, and wastewater facilities in the communities surrounding the site.
How it is being financed
The $27 billion initial financing represents a novel approach to funding hyperscale infrastructure. Meta has been pioneering new data centre financing models, and Hyperion pushes the concept further. Blue Owl Capital, a private-credit investment firm, owns 80 per cent of the project through a special-purpose vehicle called Beignet, while Meta holds the remaining 20 per cent. Meta operates and leases the facility on a long-term basis, with a four-year exit ramp built into the lease structure.
BlackRock purchased more than $3 billion of bonds issued by the joint venture, in a sale arranged by Morgan Stanley. The off-balance-sheet structure allows Meta to build at scale without loading the full $27 billion onto its own balance sheet, a significant consideration when the company’s total 2026 capital expenditure guidance has already risen to between $125 billion and $145 billion. Louisiana has also granted a sales-tax exemption on the AI chips that will fill the facility, a concession that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the project’s lifetime.
The political context
Hyperion has attracted political attention at every level. Mark Zuckerberg has treated the project as a personal priority, pitching it directly to President Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson (whose congressional district includes Richland Parish), and Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry. Trump referenced the project at a Cabinet meeting in August 2025, citing a $50 billion figure that has since been superseded by the $200 billion estimate.
Governor Landry called the original announcement “a new chapter” for Louisiana, and the state has moved to fast-track regulatory approvals for the power infrastructure. The political dynamics are straightforward: Meta gets the energy, land, and tax treatment it needs for the project, Louisiana gets the largest single private investment in the state’s history, and elected officials at every level get to claim credit for the jobs and economic activity it generates.
The cost structure
Meta reported record quarterly revenue of $56.3 billion in the first quarter of 2026, but the company simultaneously raised its full-year capital expenditure guidance to $125 billion to $145 billion, nearly double the $72.2 billion it spent in 2025. The capex increase prompted the stock to fall more than 6 per cent in after-hours trading. On the same day, Meta completed a $25 billion bond sale to help fund its infrastructure programme.
The company is cutting 8,000 jobs and cancelling 6,000 open roles to partially offset the infrastructure spending, a restructuring that Zuckerberg has framed explicitly as a reallocation from payroll to compute. Evercore estimates the layoffs will generate approximately $3 billion in annualised savings, while Bank of America projects $7 billion to $8 billion. Either way, the savings cover a fraction of the capex plan, which is why the Wall Street financing structure and off-balance-sheet approach are so central to Meta’s strategy.
The energy question
The decision to power Hyperion with 10 natural gas plants has drawn scrutiny from environmental groups. The Sierra Club has questioned whether the project’s economic benefits justify the environmental cost, particularly given Meta’s previous commitments to renewable energy. The company’s response has been to pair the gas plants with commitments to renewable energy and battery storage, and to explore nuclear power as a longer-term option.
The energy demands of AI infrastructure are reshaping the American power grid. US utilities plan to spend $1.4 trillion by 2030 to meet demand from data centres, with residential customers potentially bearing nearly half the cost. Hyperion alone will consume more electricity than many mid-sized American cities, and the 10 gas-fired plants Meta is funding represent a meaningful addition to Louisiana’s total generating capacity.
The competitive context
Hyperion is the largest single project in Meta’s infrastructure expansion, but it is not the only one. The company is also building Prometheus, a one-gigawatt AI supercluster in Ohio coming online this year, and is raising $13 billion for a separate data centre in El Paso, Texas. Across the five largest technology companies, combined 2026 capital expenditure is on track to exceed $650 billion, with Amazon guiding to approximately $200 billion, Alphabet to $180 billion to $190 billion, and Meta to its $125 billion to $145 billion range.
The scale of spending reflects a shared conviction among hyperscalers that AI compute capacity will be the defining competitive advantage of the next decade, and that building it requires investment on a scale previously associated with national infrastructure programmes rather than private companies. Hyperion is the most extreme expression of that conviction: a single campus that will cost more than the GDP of most countries, powered by its own fleet of gas-fired power plants, financed through Wall Street structures designed for sovereign debt, and justified by the belief that the returns from AI will eventually make $200 billion look like a prudent investment.
