Meta Expands Hyperion AI Data Center Campus with Major Land Acquisition
February 9, 2026
In a significant move underscoring the hyperscale race for artificial intelligence infrastructure, Meta Platforms Inc. has substantially expanded the land holdings for its planned "Hyperion" mega-data center campus in Louisiana. The acquisition signals the tech giant's accelerating and massive investment in compute capacity to power its AI ambitions. According to reports, Meta quietly purchased an additional 1,400 acres of land adjacent to the existing 2,250-acre site in Richland Parish late last year. The land was acquired from local owner George B. Franklin & Sons, and early site preparation is already reportedly underway on the new parcel. This expansion comes just over a year after Meta first announced the Hyperion project in late 2024, which envisioned a four-million-square-foot facility with a power capacity of 2 gigawatts (GW). The scale of the project is monumental. The original campus was estimated to cost $10 billion and has already employed more than 3,700 construction workers. In a clear indication of scaled-up ambitions, Meta formed a $27 billion joint venture with investment firm Blue Owl Capital in October 2025 specifically to fund this and similar gigawatt-scale AI data center projects. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously stated that the Hyperion site "could scale up to 5GW over several years." This land purchase is a tangible step toward that expanded vision. The development is part of a broader, aggressive infrastructure push by Meta. In January 2026, the company established a new division, Meta Compute, with the stated goal of building "tens of gigawatts of compute this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time," as Zuckerberg outlined. Alongside its owned construction, Meta has also committed tens of billions of dollars in cloud deals with providers like Google Cloud, CoreWeave, and Nebius to secure additional, immediate AI training capacity. The expansion of the Hyperion campus reflects a critical trend in the data center industry, where leading AI developers are moving beyond leasing space to directly controlling the development of power-dense, campus-scale facilities. These mega-projects, often requiring their own substations and extensive land for cooling infrastructure, are becoming essential to support the next generation of large language models and AI services. Meta's latest land acquisition positions it to potentially double the physical footprint of one of its flagship AI infrastructure projects.
Source: datacenterdynamics
