Meta has kicked its AI ambitions into high gear with the announcement of Hyperion, a colossal data centre project that CEO Mark Zuckerberg says will ultimately deliver five gigawatts (GW) of computational power—enough to compete with leading players like OpenAI and Google DeepMind. Zuckerberg revealed the plans in a post on social media, describing Hyperion as the backbone of Meta’s upcoming AI Superintelligence Lab. The facility will provide the computational scale needed to train next-generation AI models and will be so vast in scale that it could, by size, cover most of Manhattan.

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Fuelling the AI Arms Race

This move marks another aggressive step by Meta to position itself as a frontrunner in the rapidly intensifying AI race. After recruiting key figures such as Alexandr Wang (formerly of Scale AI) and Daniel Gross (previously at Safe Superintelligence), the company is now investing heavily in the infrastructure needed to support cutting-edge model development. According to Meta spokesperson Ashley Gabriel, Hyperion is expected to be located in Richland Parish, Louisiana—the same site where Meta had earlier proposed a $10 billion data centre initiative. Gabriel stated that while two gigawatts of capacity are expected to be operational by 2030, the centre will be scaled up to five gigawatts in the years that follow.

Prometheus: Meta’s Other AI Giant

In tandem with Hyperion, Meta is also working on another ambitious project: Prometheus, a one-gigawatt AI supercluster slated to go live in 2026. This facility, located in New Albany, Ohio, will make Meta one of the few tech firms in the world to control a data centre of this size for AI operations. The combination of Hyperion and Prometheus gives Meta a significant advantage in AI compute, which is increasingly seen as the defining factor in determining the pace of innovation in the space. These centres could also serve as magnets for top-tier AI talent, offering the infrastructure scale few other companies can match.

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Powering AI at a Community's Cost?

However, this massive build-out may come at a steep cost to nearby communities. Combined, Hyperion and Prometheus will consume enough electricity to power millions of homes. This level of demand has raised concerns about the strain on local resources. A recent report by The New York Times revealed that in Newton County, Georgia—home to another Meta data centre project—residents experienced water shortages, with taps reportedly running dry. Meta’s operations are far from alone in this trend. AI hyperscaler CoreWeave is also expanding a facility in Texas that is expected to double the electricity usage of a nearby city, according to Bloomberg.

A New Phase in the AI Infra War

As the competition in AI heats up, it is clear that compute capacity—not just algorithms or talent—is becoming the ultimate battleground. With Hyperion and Prometheus, Meta is staking its claim in this new frontier.  But the question remains: can this level of energy consumption be sustained without wider consequences for the communities around these megastructures?