Meta’s Hyperion and Prometheus Bet Big, and the Bill Is Rising

Meta’s Hyperion data center in Louisiana grew to 5 gigawatts and past $50 billion this week. The expansion, confirmed in a Monday blog post, more than doubles Hyperion’s earlier price tag. It lands as Wall Street keeps asking whether Mark Zuckerberg’s superintelligence bet will ever pay for itself.

The ambition behind it is real. Prometheus, Meta’s first gigawatt-class supercluster, is already rising in Ohio, with more so-called titan clusters planned across the country. But turning an advertising company once famous for needing little capital into a builder of nuclear-scale power campuses is unsettling some of the same investors who prized Meta’s fat margins.

Hyperion’s Bill Climbs Past $50 Billion

Meta confirmed Monday that its Hyperion supercluster in Richland Parish, Louisiana, is expanding to 5 gigawatts of compute capacity, up from an original design of 2 gigawatts. The company said the cost has climbed alongside it, from $27 billion in October to more than $50 billion now.

Bloomberg has since reported the ultimate cost could run as high as $250 billion, citing a person familiar with Meta’s investment plans. Meta has not confirmed that higher figure.

A Meta spokesperson said the project should reach 2 gigawatts of capacity by 2030, with the full 5-gigawatt build finished around 2032.

At full scale, the campus is expected to draw roughly as much power as 4 million American homes use at once, or about what New York City pulls on a cold winter day, the company said.

Independent researchers at Epoch AI, which tracks AI infrastructure by satellite imagery and regulatory filings, offer an independent estimate pegging Prometheus’s cost near $32 billion as it scales toward roughly 1 million Nvidia-class chips. Meta has not published its own figure for Prometheus specifically.

What Does Meta Mean by Superintelligence?

Meta defines superintelligence as AI that outperforms humans across a broad range of tasks, a tier above the general AI most rivals chase. Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, has said the distinction shapes how the company justifies its spending and hiring.

“For our superintelligence effort, I am focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry,” Wang said, adding that the company will commit hundreds of billions of dollars to compute for the effort.

The framing sets Meta apart from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, each of which uses its own language for the frontier of AI development. It also helps explain unusually large hiring, including senior engineers reportedly offered compensation packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The infrastructure feeds a growing product list: Muse Spark 1.1, a coding model now in U.S. public preview; Muse Image, an image generator that defaults to public Instagram profiles; and Ambient Meta AI, an assistant built into Meta’s apps. Without the compute, none of it ships at the pace Meta wants.

Wall Street Watches the Capex Climb

Meta spent $72.2 billion on capital expenditures in 2025. In January, it guided 2026 spending to $115 billion to $135 billion. By its first-quarter earnings call in April, that range had climbed again, to $125 billion to $145 billion.

The stock fell more than 6% in after-hours trading the day of that April guidance. Meta has separately said it expects to spend $600 billion on U.S. data centers through 2028.

Two weeks before the Hyperion news, Zuckerberg announced a new internal division called Meta Compute, tasked with securing the power and chips the buildout requires. He named Dina Powell McCormick, a former deputy national security adviser to President Trump, as Meta’s new president and vice chair, focused on financing data centers with governments abroad.

Not everyone welcomed the move.

Meta gives in, throwing away its one saving grace. Watch ROIC crash.

Michael Burry, the investor famous for his early bet against the 2008 housing market, posted that reaction the day Meta Compute was announced, according to Fortune. His argument: Meta had long been prized for generating enormous profit without heavy physical investment, and the new structure pushes it toward a capital-intensive model closer to a utility.

Patrick Moorhead, founder of Moor Insights and Strategy, said the reorganization puzzled him at first, before he concluded it reflected how urgently hyperscalers now need help securing power and financing.

Zuckerberg himself has sent mixed signals this month. He has told reporters Meta’s agentic AI push “hasn’t really accelerated” and that some AI bets “haven’t come to fruition yet,” even as shares wobbled on both remarks.

Richland Parish and the Price of Power

Meta says it is covering its own tab, funding seven new natural gas plants, battery storage at three sites and roughly 240 miles of transmission lines with utility Entergy, which estimates the arrangement will produce about $2.65 billion in combined benefits for its Louisiana customer base.

Battery storage is becoming its own front in the AI power race; a $365 million battery storage acquisition for data centers elsewhere this year shows how much capital is chasing the same grid-stabilizing technology Entergy is deploying for Hyperion.

“We’re delivering real economic impact alongside the AI infrastructure that will power the future,” said Rachel Peterson, Meta’s vice president of data centers.

Meta makes similar claims elsewhere. In Alberta, Canada, the company’s new 1-gigawatt Sturgeon data center runs on natural gas turbines while Meta markets its electricity as fully clean, using renewable energy certificates to close the gap. A gas-powered Alberta campus marketed as clean energy has drawn accusations of greenwashing from independent observers, even as the provincial government defends the arrangement.

Ohio and Pennsylvania tell a different version of the same story. Jesse Jenkins, an engineering professor at Princeton University who studies energy systems, has warned that bringing Prometheus online without a matching new power source will push electricity rates higher across the mid-Atlantic grid, where ratepayers are already absorbing costs tied to new data centers.

Regulators in several places are pushing back on the pace of the buildout:

• New York has paused permits for data centers of 50 megawatts and larger while it writes new siting rules.
• Maine lawmakers passed a statewide moratorium on new data centers this year, only for the governor to veto it.
• Alberta’s system operator approved Meta’s gas-fueled campus after concluding 1,200 additional megawatts of data center load would not compromise grid reliability.

Hyperion’s 5-gigawatt target is 100 times larger than the New York threshold now under review.

How Big Is a Gigawatt, Really?

A single gigawatt of data center capacity can power somewhere between 750,000 and 876,000 average homes for a year, depending on whose estimate is used. Meta’s 5-gigawatt Hyperion campus is expected to draw roughly as much electricity as New York City pulls on a winter day, by the company’s own comparison.

The estimates vary because gigawatt figures usually describe planned IT capacity, not the extra power needed for cooling, transmission losses and backup generation. A single Nvidia GB200 server rack alone can draw up to 120 kilowatts, and a 5-gigawatt campus could eventually house tens of thousands of such racks.

Hyperscalers are not incidental to this math. Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services account for 60 to 70 percent of all U.S. data center load, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Meta itself has disclosed that across its 24 U.S. data centers, more than half of the electricity it draws still comes from fossil fuels, a gap laid out in a shareholder filing detailing Meta’s fossil fuel reliance even as the company says it matches its annual use with renewable energy purchases.

Three More Titan Clusters Are Already Rising

Prometheus and Hyperion are not the whole plan. SemiAnalysis, a chip industry research firm that tracks construction by satellite imagery and regulatory filings, reports Meta is simultaneously building three more unnamed titan clusters in El Paso, Iowa and Indiana. Meta has not named them or given opening dates.

The same research suggests Prometheus itself has already outgrown its original billing, expanding from roughly 1 gigawatt toward more than 3 gigawatts within two years, though Meta has not confirmed that figure.

The scramble for power is not unique to Meta or to the United States. The power scarcity throttling AI data centers worldwide is pushing governments in France and India’s competing pitches for AI data centers to offer incentives for the same scarce turbines and transformers Meta is buying up in Louisiana and Ohio.

Hyperion’s full 5-gigawatt build stays on the books for around 2032, six years from now, whether or not superintelligence arrives on schedule.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Much Does Meta’s Prometheus Data Center Cost?

Epoch AI estimates Prometheus’s capital cost at $23.9 billion today, rising toward $32.4 billion as it scales. Meta built part of the site using rapid-deployment tent structures connected by a 300-foot-wide utility corridor and a 20-acre power generation yard, according to state permit filings, a method chosen for speed over conventional construction.

Why Is Hyperion’s Price Tag So Much Higher Than Prometheus’s?

Hyperion is simply a bigger campus. It spans roughly 2,250 acres in Richland Parish and is expected to grow toward nearly 10 million square feet of buildings, compared with Prometheus’s footprint spread across an existing Ohio business park. Its 5-gigawatt target is five times Prometheus’s original 1-gigawatt design.

Is Meta Borrowing Money to Build These Data Centers?

Meta is doing both. For Prometheus, the company is raising a separate $3 billion construction loan bundled with on-site natural gas generation, according to the Financial Times, built to run in “island mode” by switching to independent power if the grid fails. For Hyperion, Blue Owl Capital holds roughly 80% of the venture behind the original 2-gigawatt phase, with Meta holding 20% and leasing back the finished facility, CNBC has reported.

Will Local Electricity Bills Rise Because of These Data Centers?

Meta and Entergy say no, arguing the utility deal lowers costs by adding new generation and transmission paid for by Meta. In March, Meta joined other tech firms at the White House in signing a “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” a voluntary agreement that Spotlight PA reported has “few specifics or teeth.”

What Is Meta Superintelligence Labs?

Meta Superintelligence Labs is the internal research division formed after the company invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and brought on its chief executive, Alexandr Wang, to lead the effort. The lab also recruited former GitHub chief executive Nat Friedman, Safe Superintelligence chief executive Daniel Gross, and Ruoming Pang, poached from Apple’s AI foundation models team.

How Is Meta’s Approach Different From OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s?

Meta owns and builds its own data centers rather than renting capacity, unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, which lean on cloud partners such as Microsoft, Amazon and Nvidia. But even Meta still buys outside capacity when it is short: the company has signed cloud deals worth $14.2 billion with CoreWeave and $3 billion with Nebius, and is reportedly negotiating a $20 billion contract with Oracle.