More than 2,000 acres of reddish clay earth have been leveled by a fleet of excavators on a peaceful area of former farmland in northeastern Louisiana. Black bears still roam this remote Richland Parish, which was once a floodplain and is now home to a quarter of the 20,000 people living below the poverty line. The area is tangled with flowing bayous and untamed canebrake.
Let's introduce Meta, the sixth-biggest firm globally in terms of market capitalization. With the help of an enormous number of additional gas-fired power, the tech giant is eager to establish its most ambitious AI goals in Richland. The area contains a lot of land and is close to the massive Haynesville Shale gas production in Louisiana.
Meta's largest data center to date, a $10 billion complex of nine buildings that will house bank upon bank of servers occupying more than 4 million square feet—an area greater than Disneyland—began construction in December.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and chairman of Meta, isn't done yet. In July, Putin gave the project the name "Hyperion." It was a data center "supercluster" that would eventually consume as much energy as four million homes, making it the largest data center project in the world. Hyperion would cover a "significant part of the footprint of Manhattan," according to Zuckerberg.
The effort involves training open-source huge language models using more than 2 gigawatts of computer power, with the potential to grow to 5 gigawatts in the future, according to Zuckerberg. With past failures and the multibillion-dollar "Metaverse" debacle, Meta fell behind in the AI race. In addition to stealing AI talent with $250 million compensation packages and purchasing a 49% interest in Scale AI, he is now portraying Hyperion and his building binge as the quest for "superintelligence."
Competing with companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and OpenAI, it's the most recent in a grandiose game of Big Tech one-upmanship in AI.
During Meta's July 30 earnings call, Zuckerberg stated, "We are making all these investments because we have conviction that superintelligence is going to improve every aspect of what we do." Since it's unclear how AI will have changed by the time the complex opens in 2030, a Meta representative told Fortune that it's impossible to predict exactly what it would power.
Locals in this peaceful area are in a state of shock due to the enormity.
Justin Clark, pastor of First Baptist Church in nearby Rayville, stated, "I think, like a lot of people, my initial reaction was kind of blown away that a site [so] rural was chosen for something like that." "That emotion just persisted as we began to understand more about what it was and what the scope involved. astonishment of "Good grief."
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