Meta is currently building out a data center, called Hyperion, which the company expects to supply its new AI lab with five gigawatts (GW) of computational power, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Monday post on Threads.
The announcement marks Meta’s latest move to get ahead of OpenAI and Google in the AI race. After previously poaching top talent to run Meta Superintelligence Lab, including former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and former Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross, Meta now seems to be turning its attention to the massive computational power needed to train frontier AI models.
Zuckerberg said Hyperion’s footprint will be large enough to cover most of Manhattan. He also noted that Meta plans to bring a 1 GW super cluster, called Prometheus, online in 2026, making it one of the first tech companies to do so.
Meta’s AI data center build-out seems likely to make the company more competitive with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic in its ability to train and serve leading AI models. It’s possible the effort could also help Meta attract additional talent, who may be drawn to work at a company with the computational needs to compete in the AI race.
Together, Prometheus and Hyperion will soak up enough energy to power millions of homes, which could pull significant amounts of electricity and water from neighboring communities. One of Meta’s data center projects in Newton County, Georgia, has already caused the water taps to run dry in some residents’ homes, The New York Times reported Monday.
Other AI data center projects may cause similar problems for people living near them. AI hyperscaler CoreWeave is planning a data center expansion that is projected to double the electricity needs of a city near Dallas, Texas, according to Bloomberg.
Nevertheless, tech companies are determined to build out massive datacenter projects to power their AI ambitions. Other notable efforts include OpenAI’s Stargate project with Oracle and Softbank, as well as xAI’s Colossus supercomputer.
The Trump administration has largely championed the tech industry’s AI data center buildout. President Donald Trump helped OpenAI announce its Stargate project, and has since spoken about efforts to expand America’s AI infrastructure.
In a column featured in The Economist on Monday, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright called for the U.S. to “lead the next major energy-intensive frontier: artificial intelligence.” He noted that AI transforms electricity into the “most valuable output imaginable: intelligence,” and that the federal government would accelerate the production of energy derived from coal, nuclear, geothermal, and natural gas.
With the support of federal officials, the AI industry seems poised to soak up much of America’s energy in the years to come. Experts estimate that data centers could account for 20% of America’s energy consumption by 2030, up from just 2.5% in 2022. Without rapidly increased energy production, that could cause even more problems for communities.
