Meta is sinking $10B into rural Louisiana to build its wildest AI aspirations

Summary

On a quiet patch of former farmland in northeastern Louisiana, a fleet of excavators has leveled more than 2,000 acres of reddish clay earth. This is rural Richland Parish, once a floodplain tangled with meandering bayous and wild canebrake where black bears still wander and a quarter of the 20,000 residents live below the poverty line. Enter Meta—the sixth-largest company in the world by market cap. The tech giant is keen on making Richland home to its wildest AI aspirations—courtesy of a tremendous amount of new gas-fired power. The region has ample land and sits adjacent to Louisiana’s huge Haynesville Shale gas field. In December, construction began on Meta’s biggest-yet data center: a $10 billion complex of nine buildings, housing bank upon bank of servers that will take up over 4 million square feet, an area larger than Disneyland. Meta chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t stopping there. He dubbed the project “Hyperion” in July—a data center “supercluster” that eventually could use the energy equivalent of 4 million homes and become the world’s biggest data center project. Zuckerberg said Hyperion would cover a “significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.” The project entails more than 2 gigawatts of computing capacity—Zuckerberg said it could eventually expand to 5 gigawatts—programmed to train open-source large language models. Meta lagged in the AI race with previous flops and the multibillion-dollar “Metaverse” boondoggle. Now he’s framing Hyperion and his construction spree as the pursuit of “superintelligence,” while poaching AI talent using $250 million pay packages and buying a 49% stake in Scale AI. It’s the latest in a grandiose game of Big Tech one-upmanship in AI, competing with the likes of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and OpenAI. “We are making all these investments because we have conviction that superintelligence is going to improve every aspect of what we do,” Zuckerberg said in Meta’s July 30 earnings call. A Meta spokesperson told Fortu...