Meta Platforms Inc. today announced plans to significantly expand the scope of its Hyperion data center project.
The Facebook parent is seeking to build a sprawling artificial intelligence hub in Richland Parish, Louisiana. When Meta first disclosed the initiative in late 2024, it stated that the project budget would exceed $10 billion. It boosted the price tag to $27 billion last year.
The revised plan that Meta announced today will see it invest more than $50 billion in the site. According to the company, Hyperion will provide more than 5 gigawatts worth of computing power at full capacity. One gigawatt corresponds to the electricity usage of several hundred thousand homes.
Hyperion will draw electricity from 10 new power plants that are set to be built by Entergy Corp., a local utility. The latter company also plans to install 1.5 gigawatts of solar power generation and storage equipment. Entergy will reportedly build more than 100 miles of transmission lines to link the new energy systems with Hyperion.
Last year, Meta inked a deal with investment firm Blue Owl Capital to jointly finance the project. The fund will receive a 80% stake in exchange for a multibillion investment. Blue Owl’s role in the newly announced plan to expand the campus is unclear.
According to Bloomberg, the $50 billion project budget shared by Meta today doesn’t include the chips that Hyperion will host. Factoring in processors and certain related items reportedly increases the price tag to $250 billion.
Hyperion will presumably host not only Nvidia Corp. graphics cards but also Meta’s custom silicon. Earlier this year, the Facebook parent debuted a series of internally developed chips optimized for inference workloads.
The most advanced accelerator in the lineup is known as the MTI 500. It will provide 30 petaflops of MX4 performance, which will make it twice as fast as Meta’s current-generation MTI 400 chip. The MTI 500 also uses about 40% more electricity.
The bulk of the accelerator’s processing power comes from four chiplets equipped with inference-optimized circuits. There are also two networking chiplets that manage the flow of data to and from other processors. According to Meta, up to 72 MTI 500 chips can be installed in a single server rack.
The company says that it has so far awarded about $1.6 billion worth of contracts to Louisiana businesses in connection with the project. It plans to spend an additional $1 billion on upgrading local roads, water infrastructure and wastewater systems. The company expects Hyperion to create more than 1,000 jobs when it becomes fully operational.
Photo: Meta
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