Meta’s AI data center cost went from $10 billion to $50 billion in under 2 years—and split the town in two

Meta’s sprawling AI data center in rural Louisiana just got a massive cash infusion, but not everyone close to the project is celebrating.

The company said Monday its Hyperion supercluster in Richland Parish will expand to a 5-gigawatt facility costing more than $50 billion, making it Meta’s largest data center and one of the biggest AI infrastructure projects in the world. The site was earlier projected to deliver more than 2 gigawatts of compute capacity, the kind of power needed to train the large language models behind tools like ChatGPT. When construction began in 2024, the price tag was $10 billion.

That means the cost of the project has quintupled in less than two years, largely thanks to deep-pocketed private capital and the state’s willingness to forgo tax revenue to land the deal. In late 2024, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed a law making data centers built before 2029 sales-tax-exempt for 20 years.

But missing out on tax revenue doesn’t appear to bother Landry. In a Monday statement, he said since the deal was signed, the state has “secured more than $150 billion in new investment by creating an environment where companies can move quickly and build at scale.”

Some business owners appear to be on the same page, claiming their workers are earning more with additional people and resources.

“We’ve been in the charter bus business for 29 years, but nothing compares to what Meta’s project has meant for us,” Scott Holmes, owner of local business Mayo Tours, said in a statement. “We went from 40 coaches to 102, and most of our drivers onsite are now earning over $80,000 a year in a region where the median income is $42,000.”

But not all locals see this behemoth of a data center project as good for the area. Hyperion sits in a parish of about 20,000 people, one of the poorest in Louisiana, and the expansion is reviving hard questions about who ultimately foots the bill for a project of this scale. 

The buildout has already brought heavier traffic, rising rents, and even attempted evictions as thousands of construction workers pour into the........

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