Inside Meta’s chaotic AI boomtown in rural Louisiana

Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition: With AI focus, Meta lays Off 700 while rewarding top executives…Google’s memory breakthrough deepens chip selloff...Outgoing CEOs of major companies are citing AI as a factor in their decisions to step down.

Reporting on the ground in northeast Louisiana last month, where Meta is building its massive Hyperion AI data center on over 2,250 acres of former farmland, I was struck by a street sign just minutes from soybean fields, grain silos, and grazing cows.

The sign, marking a newly-built road leading into the construction site, carries an appropriate name: Far Far Away Lane. The nod to Star Wars hints at a new frontier, but the Meta site is so disorientingly vast that what’s happening there feels less like sci-fi and more like the early stages of a city rising from the dirt. The site is five miles long and a mile wide at some points, steel frames jut from the ground, heavy machinery operates around the clock, and an endless stream of trucks pours in before sunrise, feeding a project where thousands of workers in hardhats and neon vests swarm. Residents complain about damage to their vehicles from rocks kicked up by the trucks hurtling to and from the Meta site. 

Something enormous and unfamiliar has landed in rural Richland Parish, and it represents not just Meta’s stratospheric AI ambitions, but the financial, energy-hungry reality of building the infrastructure that underpins the AI boom.

I hope you’ll check out the second article in my series on the effects of the AI data center boom on local communities (the first was a December story on a data center developer’s designs on a vast desert site outside of Phoenix). Meta’s Hyperion arrives at a moment when data centers are no longer just an infrastructure issue—they’re becoming a political one. Just this week, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a moratorium on new data center development, citing concerns about energy use, environmental impact, and strain on local communities. And Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) just floated taxing AI data centers to fund support for workers displaced by automation—a sign that policymakers are starting to connect the infrastructure buildout directly to labor disruption.

But in northeast Louisiana, the impact is hyperlocal. Meta’s project is transforming Richland Parish into a chaotic boomtown almost overnight, with attendant winners and losers. Some businesses are seeing a surge in demand from construction crews, while some residents are being pushed out as housing costs climb and landlords look to capitalize on the influx of higher-paying workers.

Supporters of the project argue that the Meta investment represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for a region that has struggled with poverty, job loss, and population decline for decades. But for some Richland Parish residents, the experience is less one of opportunity than of spectatorship: watching the bustle of progress unfold nearby—and suffering through its accompanying headaches—without being able to participate or share in its rewards.

It remains to be seen how this unprecedented AI data center spending spree will play out. Collectively, the biggest tech hyperscalers are projected to invest roughly $630 billion to $700 billion in 2026 alone, a 62% jump from 2025, with total AI-related data-center capital expenditures expected to reach $5.2 trillion by 2030, driven largely by GPUs and energy infrastructure. Across tech, finance, and policy circles, there’s a growing question: is this a lasting buildout, or the kind of spending surge that precedes a correction?

Meanwhile, Meta’s Hyperion is just an example of something that is becoming more familiar across the country: mega-scale data center projects, providing the computing power underpinning the AI boom and the U.S. race against China to dominate the sector, are changing landscapes, straining energy grids and water tables, and reshaping the economy. 

Because Hyperion is among the furthest along of today’s mega AI data center projects, it may offer one of the first glimpses of how this boom plays out—and the rest of the country is watching. Read the full story here.

With that, here’s more AI news.

Sharon Goldman
sharon.goldman@fortune.com
@sharongoldman

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com