On 27 August, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, revealed at a cabinet meeting that Meta planned to invest $50 billion in a large-scale data centre called “Hyperion” in rural Louisiana, a project that would serve as part of a “superintelligence” strategy aimed at reshaping Meta’s position in global science and technology competition through large-scale AI infrastructure.
The “Hyperion” data centre in Meta, located in the Ricland diocese of Louisiana, was designed as one of the largest AI data centres in the world to support digital infrastructure, including artificial intelligence work loads. According to Trump, the data centre is large enough “to supersume over Manhattan” and its computational capacity is expected to exceed 2 GW, with the potential to expand to 5 GW in the future to match the electricity demand of a major city.
According to Bloomberg, Meta has worked with the United States bond giant PIMCO and alternative asset management company Blue Owl Capital to raise $29 billion in financing for the project and to record the scale of funding for a single AI data centre. This huge investment reflects Meta’s “all-in” strategy in the AI area, especially after its open-language model, Llama 4 market, and the loss of AI team executives, the company’s commitment to super-intelligence has become more pressing.
At a cabinet meeting on 26 August 2025, Trump expressed shock at the cost of the Hyperion project, saying, “When they say they want $50 billion to build a factory, I say, “What is this plant?” He showed a graph allegedly provided by Zuckerberg, highlighting the size of the data centre as compared to Manhattan. Trump also noted that United States companies were able to build data centres of such magnitude, in part thanks to their Government ‘ s policy of allowing enterprises to build their own power facilities, which eased the enormous pressure on the electricity grid by the AI data centre.
The Hyperion project in Meta is part of the global AI infrastructure boom. In 2025, Amazon, Google and Microsoft announced investments of between $75 billion and $100 billion, respectively, for the construction of data centres, while OpenAI’s “Stargate” project aimed at a $500 billion super-data centre complex with an initial investment of $100 billion.
The United States Department of Energy predicts that by 2028, the demand for electricity in the data centre could triple, accounting for 12 per cent of the national electricity consumption. This trend has contributed to a boom in the construction of gas power plants, with the industrial research institute Enverus predicting a 20 per cent increase in the United States of America ‘ s new gas capacity of 46 GW over the next five years.
The energy needs of the Hyperion data centre are particularly alarming, as it operates at twice as much power as New Orleans, and the power needed for cooling servers is equally large. Zuckerberg indicated that the centre would be used to train open-source large-language models, but the specific uses were not clear, as AI technology might have evolved significantly by 2030.
