Meta's Hyperion Campus Will Draw More Power Than the Entire State of South Dakota

The scale of what Meta is building in northeastern Louisiana has become genuinely difficult to contextualize. The company has agreed to fund the construction of 10 natural gas power plants through New Orleans-based utility Entergy, adding 7.5 gigawatts of electrical capacity — enough to power more than 5 million homes and representing a more than 30% increase to Louisiana's entire existing grid. The plants, seven newly announced and three previously approved in 2025, will cost approximately $11 billion to build and are dedicated to powering Meta's Hyperion AI campus. The total power draw exceeds the electricity consumption of the state of South Dakota.

Hyperion: The Numbers

Hyperion was announced in December 2024 as a $10 billion, 2,250-acre investment in Richland Parish, a rural community in northeastern Louisiana. Since then, Meta has acquired an additional 1,400 acres, and a joint venture with Blue Owl Capital has pushed total development cost estimates toward $27 billion. Mark Zuckerberg has described the campus as covering "a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan." Meta VP of Data Centers Rachel Peterson called it "a symbol of the ambition and scale of next-generation AI infrastructure."

The Entergy deal is structured with ratepayer protection provisions: Peterson explicitly stated that Meta is ensuring "Entergy's other consumers aren't paying our costs." The contract runs for 15 years — a commitment that lock-in both parties for a period long enough to span multiple AI capability generations. Entergy shareholders reacted immediately: the utility's stock jumped 7% on announcement day, reaching a record market cap of roughly $50 billion, up approximately 125% over the prior two years.

The Fossil Fuel Tension

Meta has also agreed to fund up to 2.5 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity, including battery storage, alongside the gas plants — but the primary baseload commitment is unambiguously fossil fuel. This places Meta alongside Microsoft, Google, and Amazon in a growing pattern: tech companies with active net-zero pledges signing some of the largest fossil fuel energy contracts in American history, treating carbon commitments as long-term aspirations while treating compute availability as an immediate existential priority.

The geographic logic is clear. Texas has attracted similar commitments with competitive electricity rates, available land, and lower regulatory friction — but Louisiana offers proximity to Entergy's existing transmission infrastructure and the capacity to accommodate the 7.5GW load without requiring a complete grid build from scratch. For the AI infrastructure race, energy availability has become the binding constraint that determines where the next generation of compute will be built. Hyperion is the most extreme expression yet of what happens when that constraint is treated as a first-order strategic problem.