Meta Platforms has embarked on an ambitious data center build-out to power its AI ambitions. This includes Hyperion, a massive facility to be built in Louisiana that “will be able to scale up to 5 gigawatts over several years,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on Threads with a graphic illustrating how its planned footprint is nearly big enough to cover most of Manhattan. The first new plant to come online will be Prometheus in Ohio in 2026, Zuckerberg said, indicating his company will not be looking to OpenAI and Stargate partners to power Meta AI processing.

A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that Hyperion will likely be located in Louisiana’s Richland Parish district, where Meta in December announced a $10 billion data center. The flagship plan is for it to have 2 gigawatts of capacity by 2030 and scale up from there.

A gigawatt is a unit of power equivalent to 1 billion watts. Gigawatt capacity is the maximum power load the facility can draw at any given instant, and 1 gigawatt is the average capacity of a typical nuclear power plant of the late 20th century.

TechCrunch reports that Prometheus will come online as a 1 gigawatt super cluster, built in New Albany, Ohio. The Prometheus timeline of powering on sometime in 2026 puts it on a trajectory to open right around the time OpenAI’s inaugural U.S. Stargate site in Abilene, Texas will scale to 1 gigawatt, putting the two companies in a rarefied space as the first operators of AI clusters of this scale anywhere in the world.

Developed under the codename Project Ludicrous (a reference to “Spaceballs”), Stargate’s Abilene plant had its phase one opening earlier this year with two buildings operating at 200 megawatts.

Phase two, with six additional buildings (for a total of eight) and about 1.2 gigawatts capacity is slated for mid-2026. It is part of OpenAI’s ambitious Stargate plan, announced in January as a $500 billion U.S. investment over time, with further details emerging earlier this month involving partners Oracle and Crusoe.

Referring to Zuckerberg’s Threads post announcing the power projects, SiliconANGLE said Meta “will invest hundreds of billions of dollars” in its new AI data centers.

“With the support of federal officials, the AI industry seems poised to soak up much of America’s energy in the years to come,” possibly accounting for as much as 20 percent of U.S. power consumption by 2030, “up from just 2.5 percent in 2022,” reports TechCrunch.

Data centers-as-a-service provider ECL, a startup from Meta and Microsoft veterans, has opened phase one of an off-grid hydrogen powered facility, TerraSite-TX1, near Houston that it plans to scale up to  a gigawatt capacity.

Tom’s Hardware writes Elon Musk confirmed he has purchased an overseas power plant that will ship energy to Texas to feed the needs of xAI’s Colossus AI supercomputer, which pulls 300 megawatts.

OpenAI has also set its sights globally with Stargate UAE.