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.” Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/07/13/meta-hyperion-louisiana-50-billion-tax-breaks-locals/ submitted by /u/fortune
Originally posted by u/fortune on r/ArtificialInteligence