Meta said on Monday its data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, will expand to 5 gigawatts of compute capacity, with investment in the project increasing to more than $50 billion. The company’s Hyperion project is now set to swallow even more land, energy and public attention, all in service of training large language models — the machinery behind tools such as ChatGPT.
The scale is the point. So is the power.
Who Pays for the Machine
Earthjustice asked earlier this year to investigate the financing of Meta’s Louisiana data center project, warning that the arrangement could ultimately shift project costs unfairly onto utility customers if Meta walks away before the utility recovers its investment. That request was denied. The people who would be left holding the bag had no such veto.
The announcement lands as environmental and consumer groups push back against the energy-intensive buildout. Meta’s expansion plan pushes the project far beyond what the company had earlier projected, when Hyperion was expected to deliver more than 2 gigawatts of compute capacity. Now it’s 5 gigawatts, and the bill has climbed with it.
Last year, U.S. President Donald Trump said the company’s data center project would cost $50 billion. Meta now says the investment has risen to more than $50 billion. The numbers keep growing. The burden doesn’t disappear.
Local Deals, Corporate Control
Since breaking ground in December 2024, local Louisiana businesses have received more than $1.6 billion in contracts from Meta, the company said. That money moves through the region, but the terms still come from above. Meta decides the scale, Meta decides the pace, Meta decides where the money flows.
With this expansion, the company said it plans to invest over $1 billion in local infrastructure improvements, including roads, water and wastewater systems. Those are the basics of daily life, the stuff communities need to function, now folded into a corporate megaproject tied to a private computing empire.
Meta also said teachers in Richland Parish recently received annual bonuses of up to $50,000, a 400% increase from the previous year, thanks to increased tax revenues from the company’s data center project. The bonuses are real. So is the dependence. When a single corporation’s footprint becomes large enough to reshape local budgets, even public schools start living in its shadow.
The Bigger Buildout
Meta, like its Big Tech peers, has been pouring billions of dollars into AI data centers and computing power as demand continues to outstrip supply. The company has pledged to invest $600 billion in U.S. infrastructure and jobs over the next three years. That promise sounds grand until you look at the machinery underneath it: a race for compute, land, energy and leverage, with communities asked to absorb the costs and call it progress.
Meta currently has 32 data centers across the globe in operation or under construction, 28 of which are in the United States. The footprint keeps spreading. The apparatus keeps growing.
The Richland Parish expansion shows how corporate power works when it’s dressed up as development. A giant company expands its own capacity, local institutions scramble around the edges, and the public is told to celebrate contracts, bonuses and road repairs while the core decision-making stays locked inside the boardroom. The project’s size, its financing questions and the denied Earthjustice request all point in the same direction: the people most affected get the least say.