Hyperion — Meta's 5 GW Louisiana Campus

1 · The scale is beyond precedent

Meta's Richland Parish campus is projected to consume roughly 3× the annual electricity usage of the city of New Orleans. It will add an estimated 15% to Louisiana's total statewide electricity demand.

To power it, Entergy Louisiana — the regulated utility — is building new infrastructure that ultimately includes:

• 3 natural-gas plants (initial approval, 2,200 MW)
• 7 additional gas plants (expansion approved by LA Public Service Commission, April 2026)
• ~240 miles of new 500 kV transmission lines
• Battery storage at multiple locations
• Up to 2.5 GW of renewable resources (Meta financing, deployment TBD)
• MOU to explore future nuclear for long-term capacity

Approved gas-plant generation of 7,400 MW exceeds half of Entergy Louisiana's entire current generation capacity — added for essentially one customer.

2 · The Blue Owl pivot

On the same day in December 2024 that regulators approved the initial power plan, Meta announced a parallel financial restructuring: Blue Owl Capital purchased majority ownership of the Hyperion facility. Meta became a tenant with an option to exit its lease every four years.

3 · Construction

Three general contractors are splitting the build: Turner Construction, DPR Construction, and Mortensen — three of the four major hyperscale GC firms in the US. As of early 2026, ~3,700 construction workers are on site. Peak 5,000 expected June 2026.

Over $875M in contracts have been awarded to Louisiana businesses in the first year alone. Meta projects 500+ direct new jobs when operational, plus ~1,000 indirect.

4 · The industrial pushback

The Louisiana Energy Users Group — representing 26 of the state's largest industrial consumers (refineries, chemical manufacturers) — has formally opposed aspects of the deal. Their argument: if Meta's long-term demand projections fall short, the massive new generation fleet becomes stranded rate-base, and Entergy's other customers (Exxon, Dow, residential) end up paying for it.

This is the emerging political fight of the 2026+ AI buildout: who pays when a hyperscale customer optionality collides with a utility's long-lived assets? The answer is being written in Richland Parish, and Virginia, and Mississippi.

5 · What it runs

Meta has not publicly specified Hyperion's silicon mix, but all indicators point to a mix of:

• NVIDIA B200 / GB200 NVL72 for new Llama training runs
• Meta MTIA (Meta's custom AI accelerator, now in v2) for ranking / recommendation inference at production scale
• Legacy H100/H200 racks from earlier Meta buildouts, potentially relocated

Meta is the largest custom-silicon program among hyperscalers besides Google. Hyperion will likely host both NVIDIA and MTIA at the largest scale anyone has deployed either.

6 · Lessons from Hyperion

• 5 GW is the new GW. Frontier campuses are now sized in gigawatts, not megawatts. The top 3 US operators (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta) all have active 2+ GW sites. 5 GW is the 2028-2030 target band.
• Utility risk-transfer is the hidden cost. Meta doesn't directly pay for stranded plant risk if demand collapses — Entergy's ratepayers (residential + industrial) do. This is the political fight of the next five years.
• Gas is bridging, nuclear is the play. The MOU on future nuclear is the tell: Meta expects firm clean power to be the eventual norm, but gas is the only thing scalable fast enough for 2026-2030.
• Four-year tenancy is weaponized optionality. Meta can walk every 4 years — forcing Blue Owl and Entergy to essentially underwrite AI demand projections. Whether this pencils depends entirely on Llama, Threads, and ads growth.