Meta just put a number on one of the largest private construction bets in the country: more than $50 billion for its Hyperion data center campus and the region around it in Richland Parish, Louisiana. That’s not a data center budget. That’s a regional development program with a data center at the center of it.
The site is a 2,250-acre former agricultural megasite in the rural northeast corner of the state, between Rayville, Holly Ridge, and Delhi. Turner Construction, DPR Construction, and Mortenson are running the buildout. Phase one aims for 1.5 gigawatts of capacity by late 2027, scaling toward 5 gigawatts by 2030. Full details are on the Hyperion project listing.
The grid is the hard part
A load this size doesn’t just plug in. Meta and utility Entergy are building new power generation and transmission to feed the campus, a parallel infrastructure effort that rivals the data halls in scope. That’s the pattern across the AI buildout now: the power infrastructure outside the fence is often the longer, harder project than the buildings inside it.
What a parish gets, and pays
For Richland Parish, the investment is transformational. Peak construction is expected to put around 7,500 workers on site. The tax base of a rural parish has never seen anything like it. The contention is equally real, centered on who pays for the power upgrades and whether residents’ rates rise to underwrite a hyperscaler’s load.
Hyperion is the clearest case yet of AI demand rewriting the physical map of the grid, forcing new substations and transmission lines across an entire utility’s territory. The regional context is laid out in ENR’s earlier reporting on the project’s power demands, which have only grown since.