Meta has put a shovel in the ground in Lebanon, Indiana, on what the company is calling its second 1-gigawatt data center campus and its biggest single buildout to date. The project carries a $10 billion-plus price tag, spans 1,500 acres about 30 miles northwest of Indianapolis, and will eventually carry 13 buildings totaling around 4 million square feet of slab. First buildings are expected to come online between late 2027 and early 2028.
The construction picture
Ten of the 13 buildings will be data center halls. The other three carry the warehousing, network and admin functions that a campus of this scale needs to operate. Turner has been named to the GC bench alongside other yet-to-be-disclosed contractors, which is consistent with how the hyperscalers have been splitting risk across multiple builders rather than running a single-prime job at this volume.
Peak construction labor sits at roughly 4,000 workers, with about 300 operational positions once the campus is running. Meta has also committed more than $120 million to local infrastructure: $45 million for road improvements and more than $75 million for water work, including new lift stations and capacity to keep Lebanon’s municipal system from buckling under closed-loop cooling demand.
Why this one matters
This is the second AI-class megacampus Meta has broken ground on in 12 months, after a similarly-sized Louisiana site. Together they’re a big part of the $115-135 billion capex range Meta guided to for 2026, which doubles 2025 spend and pushes capex intensity into the 55-67% of revenue band. At that ratio, every quarter of construction delay shows up directly in the model.
The Lebanon site also matters because it’s siting AI compute next to load-constrained Midwestern grids rather than in the usual Northern Virginia or Phoenix corridors. Indiana’s published response is a mix of new transmission lines and a clean-energy match that Meta has pledged to maintain at 100% of campus load. Whether that pledge is met with Indiana wind PPAs or with renewable credits from elsewhere will say a lot about how the next round of hyperscale builds line up with utility planning.
For contractors: the GC pool on these jobs is staying tight, but the structural-steel, MEP, and switchgear subs underneath are oversubscribed and Meta has been buying long-lead equipment ahead of construction. Anyone bidding adjacent work in the corridor should plan for sub-tier pricing pressure to last through 2028.