The data center gold rush continues to be mind-boggling.
Last week, my colleague Sharon Goldman learned that Meta has bought about 1,400 acres—an area almost twice the size of Central Park—next to its already massive 2,250-acre Hyperion AI data center site in Louisiana. It’s a reminder that the data center story is a real estate story: Sharon points out that the total site is now more than twice the size of the nearest international airport in New Orleans.
It’s a serious bet on Meta’s part, as Sharon writes:
The apparent expansion of Meta’s already enormous project offers a window into how the AI infrastructure boom is unfolding across the U.S. Hyperscalers—the Big Tech companies building out their AI infrastructure—are racing to lock up land, power, and financing for massive AI data-center campuses, often through debt-financed, politically sensitive expansions. Some, like the Louisiana project, are expanding so quickly that it may be difficult for local communities to spot or register concerns in real time.
In December 2024, Meta announced it was breaking ground on a $10 billion AI data center in Holly Ridge, an unincorporated community in Richland Parish, a rural county in northeast Louisiana. The facility was planned to span over 4 million square feet. To meet the energy demands, utility Entergy planned to construct three new natural gas plants near the site at a cost of $3 billion.
The original 2,250-acre project is nearly five miles long and a mile wide—already almost three times the size of Central Park. More than 3,700 construction workers have been working on the site, with reported plans for that number to climb to 5,000. And beyond the temporary employment created by the construction project, the company said it would create 500 new full-time, long-term jobs at the data center in the struggling, economically depressed area.
Now it appears that Meta has laid the financial groundwork for a much larger Hyperion build-out than originally planned.
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