5,000 MW. Meta Hyperion Louisiana — 10 Gas Plants for One AI Campus

Somewhere in the flat farmland of Richland Parish, Louisiana, 5,000 construction workers are building something that has no precedent in human history: a single AI computing campus that will eventually draw 5 gigawatts of electricity — more than the entire country of Ireland consumes on an average day. Meta's Hyperion project is not just the largest AI datacenter in the world. It is the largest single industrial construction project in the United States right now, and it is being built to train the next generation of Meta's AI models at a scale that dwarfs anything previously attempted.

What is Meta Hyperion?

Hyperion is Meta's flagship AI infrastructure campus in Richland Parish, a rural area in northeastern Louisiana. The project is structured as a joint venture between Meta and Blue Owl Capital, a real estate and private credit firm, with a total development cost of $27 billion. Phase 1 covers 2,250 acres and targets 2,000 MW of installed compute capacity by 2030, with a further 1,400-acre expansion pushing the total to 5,000 MW at full build.

The power supply contract is extraordinary: Meta has contracted with Entergy Louisiana for power from 10 combined-cycle natural gas plants with a combined generation capacity of 7.46 GW. This is not supplementary power — it is a dedicated fleet of gas plants built specifically to power one AI campus. The 4 million square feet of planned buildings will house, by industry estimates, up to 3 million GPUs at full deployment.

The Numbers

Five gigawatts. To frame that number: the Hoover Dam generates about 2 GW at peak capacity. Meta's Hyperion campus, at full build, would require the equivalent of two and a half Hoover Dams running at 100% output, continuously. The contracted power from Entergy's 10 gas plants (7.46 GW total capacity) gives a 2.46 GW margin for reliability and redundancy — because at this scale, even a fraction of a second of power interruption destroys millions of dollars in active compute workloads. The 4 million square feet of planned datacenter buildings is equivalent to 70 American football fields under a single roof.

How It's Powered and Cooled

Louisiana presents a unique challenge for large-scale cooling: high humidity and heat. The state averages summer temperatures regularly exceeding 35°C with humidity above 80%, making evaporative cooling (which requires dry air) largely ineffective. Hyperion will rely on mechanical chiller plants — massive refrigeration systems using water as a heat transfer medium — supplemented by direct liquid cooling for the densest GPU racks.

At 5,000 MW of final compute load, the cooling infrastructure alone will consume an estimated 600–1,000 MW, depending on outdoor conditions. In Louisiana's summer heat, chillers run at maximum capacity for months at a time. This is where intelligent energy management becomes decisive: pre-cooling thermal mass during overnight low-price windows, dispatching battery storage during afternoon peak prices, and coordinating HVAC setpoint adjustments with real-time grid prices can mean the difference between a profitable campus and one that bleeds energy costs.

The Stromfee Connection

Meta Hyperion is the extreme end of the AI energy problem — a project so large that it is reshaping Louisiana's entire electricity grid. Entergy is building 10 gas plants not because it wants to, but because no existing grid infrastructure can supply 5,000 MW to a single point of consumption.

For campuses of this scale, Stromfee's energy intelligence stack — BESS-Optimizer, HVAC scheduling, day-ahead price forecasting — represents a layer of financial intelligence on top of physical infrastructure. When every megawatt-hour costs real money, and when HVAC load alone is 600–1,000 MW, shifting 10% of that load to low-price windows through intelligent pre-cooling represents hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings. Stromfee's tools make that level of energy transparency accessible — from small industrial sites to the largest AI campuses in the world.

Sources: IEEE Spectrum — 5 GW Data Center · Fortune — Meta AI Data Center Hyperion Louisiana · ENR — $27B Meta Data Center Pushes Louisiana Toward Massive Power Expansion