{"id":123163,"date":"2026-02-04T22:05:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T22:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/123163\/"},"modified":"2026-02-04T22:05:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T22:05:08","slug":"meta-is-quietly-expanding-its-10-billion-hyperion-ai-data-center-to-four-times-the-size-of-nycs-central-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/123163\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta is quietly expanding its $10 billion Hyperion AI data center to four times the size of NYC’s Central Park"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meta<\/a> has quietly purchased roughly 1,400 acres\u2014an area almost twice the size of Manhattan\u2019s Central Park\u2014adjacent to its already-mammoth 2,250-acre Hyperion AI data center site in Richland Parish, Louisiana, Fortune has learned. The combined land parcels for the campus will bring the project to more than twice the size of the nearest international airport, Louis Armstrong in New Orleans. <\/p>\n

According to half a dozen people affiliated with companies working on or around the Meta site, the land purchase paves the way for a Phase 2 expansion of the Hyperion project, which has been widely discussed, including by President Donald Trump, as one of the nation\u2019s largest AI data centers in the works.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fortune observed active work underway on the newly acquired land, which several sources say was purchased from local landowners George B. Franklin & Sons roughly three to four months ago. Fortune visited the Richland Parish Assessor\u2019s office, where staffers shared paperwork that said the parcel is still listed in Franklin\u2019s name\u2014though they emphasized it can take some time for the filed deed to be updated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Activity on the land, which lies west of the original site, included utility markings, heavy equipment, on-site workers, and portable facilities\u2014signs consistent with early-stage site preparation. Permits were posted, but could not be read from the publicly accessible road.<\/p>\n

Meta declined to comment, though it had previously told Fortune that the company had \u201cnot shared anything about additional phases in terms of land.\u201d George B. Franklin & Sons did not respond to Fortune\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n

An expansion of AI ambitions<\/p>\n

The apparent expansion of Meta\u2019s already enormous project offers a window into how the AI infrastructure boom is unfolding across the U.S.\u00a0Hyperscalers\u2014the Big Tech companies building out their AI infrastructure\u2014are 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.<\/p>\n

In December 2024, Meta announced<\/a> 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<\/a> planned to construct three new natural gas plants near the site at a cost of $3 billion.<\/p>\n

The original 2,250-acre project is nearly 5 miles long and a mile wide\u2014already 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.<\/p>\n

Now it appears that Meta has laid the financial groundwork for a much larger Hyperion buildout than originally planned. In October 2025, Meta announced<\/a> it had entered a joint venture with funds managed by Blue Owl Capital to finance, build, and operate the Hyperion data center campus i\u2014an arrangement targeting up to $27 billion in total development costs. The scale and structure of the joint venture \u2014 including Blue Owl\u2019s majority capital commitment and Meta\u2019s operational role \u2014 suggest that Hyperion is intended as a long-term, multi-phase campus.<\/p>\n

Getting ahead in the AI infrastructure race<\/p>\n

There was some indication even earlier that this data center campus would be even bigger than originally planned. In August 2025, President Trump spoke<\/a> of the project at a Cabinet meeting and said that Meta planned to ultimately spend $50 billion on its data center in rural Louisiana. \u201cWhen they said $50 billion for a plant, I said, \u2018What the hell kind of plant is that?\u2019\u201d Trump said, holding up a graphic he said was given to him by Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg. It shows the data center superimposed over a large portion of Manhattan, to demonstrate the facility\u2019s massive scale. \u201cWhen you look at this, you understand why it\u2019s $50 billion,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the sheer scale of the Hyperion buildout aligns with Zuckerberg\u2019s latest comments on Meta\u2019s AI infrastructure strategy. As Fortune has reported<\/a>, Zuckerberg recently announced Meta Compute, a new \u201ctop-level initiative\u201d led by the company\u2019s most senior executives. In doing so, he reemphasized Meta\u2019s commitment to being an AI infrastructure behemoth\u2014and signaled that Meta has no intention of being an also-ran in the data center build-out race.<\/p>\n

The new organization is designed to secure the massive amounts of computing power\u2014measured in gigawatts, each of which could power hundreds of thousands of homes\u2014needed for Meta\u2019s drive to build AI models that lead to \u201csuperintelligence.\u201d And the behemoth under construction in rural Louisiana is a key part of that mission.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMeta is planning to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time,\u201d Zuckerberg wrote. \u201cHow we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meta has quietly purchased roughly 1,400 acres\u2014an area almost twice the size of Manhattan\u2019s Central Park\u2014adjacent to its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":123164,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[1527,2053,2184,75,84,83,9,24,63,1601],"class_list":{"0":"post-123163","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-manhattan","8":"tag-construction","9":"tag-data-centers","10":"tag-development","11":"tag-manhattan","12":"tag-manhattan-headlines","13":"tag-manhattan-news","14":"tag-new-york","15":"tag-new-york-city","16":"tag-nyc","17":"tag-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}