Meta Powers AI Development With Controversial Data Centers

With the goal of gaining a competitive advantage over OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, Meta is in the process of building several controversial multi-gigawatt AI data centers in the United States that will power the company’s investment in superintelligence development.

Many concerns have been raised around the environmental and community impact of these data centers and their energy requirements.

“We're calling the first one Prometheus and it's coming online in '26,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently wrote in a post on X. “We're also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years.”

Zuckerberg added that Hyperion’s footprint alone will cover “a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.” The data center, which is physically located in northeastern Louisiana, is expected to power the development of future AI models at the company’s Superintelligence Lab. 

In the past year, Meta has been heavily investing in the AI race, recently spending $14.3 billion in Scale AI -- a company that operates a global workforce of contractors who label images, text and video for machine learning applications -- in order to secure the training data for its AI models.