Meta is presently constructing out an information heart, referred to as Hyperion, which the corporate expects to provide its new AI lab with 5 gigawatts (GW) of computational energy, CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a Monday submit on Threads.
The announcement marks Meta’s newest transfer to get forward of OpenAI and Google within the AI race. After beforehand poaching prime expertise to run Meta Superintelligence Lab, together with former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and former Secure Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross, Meta now appears to be turning its consideration to the huge computational energy wanted to coach frontier AI fashions.
Zuckerberg stated Hyperion’s footprint will probably be massive sufficient to cowl most of Manhattan. Hyperion appears to be situated in northeast Louisiana, in a city referred to as Richland Parish, in response to semiconductor analysts at Semianalysis. In 2024, Meta introduced a $10 billion information heart improvement on this city, initially slated to be a two GW tremendous cluster. Zuckerberg famous in his submit that Hyperion would scale to 5 gigawatts over “a number of years.”
Zuckerberg additionally famous that Meta plans to deliver a 1 GW tremendous cluster, referred to as Prometheus, on-line in 2026, making it one of many first tech corporations to manage an AI information heart of this measurement. Prometheus appears to be a community of knowledge facilities situated round New Albany, Ohio.
Meta’s AI information heart build-out appears prone to make the corporate extra aggressive with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic in its skill to coach and serve main AI fashions. It’s potential the hassle might additionally assist Meta appeal to extra expertise, who could also be drawn to work at an organization with the computational must compete within the AI race.
Collectively, Prometheus and Hyperion will take in sufficient vitality to energy tens of millions of properties, which might pull vital quantities of electrical energy and water from neighboring communities. One among Meta’s information heart tasks in Newton County, Georgia, has already brought about the water faucets to run dry in some residents’ properties, The New York Instances reported Monday.
Different AI information heart tasks could trigger related issues for individuals dwelling close to them. AI hyperscaler CoreWeave is planning an information heart enlargement that’s projected to double the electrical energy wants of a metropolis close to Dallas, Texas, in response to Bloomberg.
Nonetheless, tech corporations are decided to construct out large datacenter tasks to energy their AI ambitions. Different notable efforts embody OpenAI’s Stargate challenge with Oracle and Softbank, in addition to xAI’s Colossus supercomputer.
The Trump administration has largely championed the tech business’s AI information heart buildout. President Donald Trump helped OpenAI announce its Stargate challenge, and has since spoken about efforts to increase America’s AI infrastructure.
In a column featured in The Economist on Monday, U.S. Secretary of Vitality Chris Wright referred to as for the U.S. to “lead the subsequent main energy-intensive frontier: synthetic intelligence.” He famous that AI transforms electrical energy into the “most respected output possible: intelligence,” and that the federal authorities would speed up the manufacturing of vitality derived from coal, nuclear, geothermal, and pure gasoline.
With the assist of federal officers, the AI business appears poised to absorb a lot of America’s vitality within the years to return. Specialists estimate that information facilities might account for 20% of America’s vitality consumption by 2030, up from simply 2.5% in 2022. With out quickly elevated vitality manufacturing, that might trigger much more issues for communities.
