Data Center cost from $10 billion to $50 billion in under 2 years 

 Sydney Lake Fortune.com 

 Meta’s sprawling AI data center in rural Louisiana just got a massive cash infusion, but not everyone close to the project is celebrating. 

The company said Monday its Hyperion supercluster in Richland Parish will expand to a 5-gigawatt facility costing more than $50 billion, making it Meta’s largest data center and one of the biggest AI infrastructure projects in the world. The site was earlier projected to deliver more than 2 gigawatts of compute capacity, the kind of power needed to train the large language models behind tools like ChatGPT. When construction began in 2024, the price tag was $10 billion. 

That means the cost of the project has quintupled in less than two years, largely thanks to deep-pocketed private capital and the state’s willingness to forgo tax revenue to land the deal. In late 2024, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed a law making data centers built before 2029 sales-tax-exempt for 20 years.