According to half a dozen people affiliated with companies working on or around the Meta site, the land purchase paves the way for a phase 2 expansion of the Hyperion project, which has been widely discussed, including by President Donald Trump, as one of the nation’s largest AI data centers in the works. 

Fortune observed active work underway on the newly acquired land, which several sources say was purchased from local landowner George B. Franklin & Sons roughly three to four months ago. Fortune visited the Richland Parish Assessor’s office, where staffers shared paperwork that said the parcel is still listed in Franklin’s name—though they emphasized it can take some time for the filed deed to be updated. 

Activity on the land, which lies west of the original site, included utility markings, heavy equipment, on-site workers, and portable facilities—signs consistent with early-stage site preparation. Permits were posted, but could not be read from the publicly accessible road.

Meta declined to comment, though it had previously told Fortune that the company had “not shared anything about additional phases in terms of land.” George B. Franklin & Sons did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

An expansion of AI ambitions

The apparent expansion of Meta’s already enormous project offers a window into how the AI infrastructure boom is unfolding across the U.S. Hyperscalers—the Big Tech companies building out their AI infrastructure—are racing to lock up land, power, and financing for massive AI data-center campuses, often through debt-financed, politically sensitive expansions. Some, like the Louisiana project, are expanding so quickly that it may be difficult for local communities to spot or register concerns in real time.

In December 2024, Meta announced it was breaking ground on a $10 billion AI data center in Holly Ridge, an unincorporated community in Richland Parish, a rural county in northeast Louisiana. The facility was planned to span over 4 million square feet. To meet the energy demands, utility Entergy planned to construct three new natural gas plants near the site at a cost of $3 billion.

The original 2,250-acre project is nearly five miles long and a mile wide—already almost three times the size of Central Park. More than 3,700 construction workers have been working on the site, with reported plans for that number to climb to 5,000. And beyond the temporary employment created by the construction project, the company said it would create 500 new full-time, long-term jobs at the data center in the struggling, economically depressed area.

Now it appears that Meta has laid the financial groundwork for a much larger Hyperion build-out than originally planned. In October 2025, Meta announced it had entered a joint venture with funds managed by Blue Owl Capital to finance, build, and operate the Hyperion data center campus—an arrangement targeting up to $27 billion in total development costs. The scale and structure of the joint venture—including Blue Owl’s majority capital commitment and Meta’s operational role—suggest that Hyperion is intended as a long-term, multiphase campus.

Getting ahead in the AI infrastructure race

There was some indication even earlier that this data center campus would be even bigger than originally planned. In August 2025, President Trump spoke of the project at a Cabinet meeting and said that Meta planned to ultimately spend $50 billion on its data center in rural Louisiana. “When they said $50 billion for a plant, I said, ‘What the hell kind of plant is that?’” Trump noted, holding up a graphic he said was given to him by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It shows the data center superimposed over a large portion of Manhattan, to demonstrate the facility’s massive scale. “When you look at this, you understand why it’s $50 billion,” Trump said.

Indeed, the sheer scale of the Hyperion build-out aligns with Zuckerberg’s latest comments on Meta’s AI infrastructure strategy. As Fortune has reported, Zuckerberg recently announced Meta Compute, a new “top-level initiative” led by the company’s most senior executives. In doing so, he reemphasized Meta’s commitment to being an AI infrastructure behemoth—and signaled that Meta has no intention of being an also-ran in the data center build-out race.

The new organization is designed to secure the massive amounts of computing power—measured in gigawatts, each of which could power hundreds of thousands of homes—needed for Meta’s drive to build AI models that lead to “superintelligence.” And the behemoth under construction in rural Louisiana is a key part of that mission. 

“Meta is planning to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time,” Zuckerberg wrote. “How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage.”