Meta has begun construction of a new data centre in Lebanon, Indiana, that the company says will cost more than $10 billion and deliver over 1 gigawatt of capacity. The facility will host both the social‑network group’s core products and a large share of its artificial‑intelligence workloads, making it one of Meta’s largest infrastructure projects to date.
A single gigawatt of IT capacity is a substantial addition to the grid: Meta frames it as enough electricity to power “hundreds of thousands” of American households. The scale highlights why hyperscalers are rushing to secure land, power and cooling in the US heartland as demand for generative‑AI compute continues to explode.
But the rush to build has generated friction with local communities. Residents around proposed and existing sites have complained about rising utility bills and the noise from cooling systems. Meta is pre‑empting some of that resistance by offering to shoulder the data centre’s electricity costs, donating $1 million a year for 20 years to a local utility community fund, funding emergency water assistance and committing more than $120 million to water‑infrastructure upgrades and local utility and road improvements.
The Lebanon site will use a closed‑loop water‑cooling system, which Meta says will require very little external water for most of the year. The company also points to broader mitigation measures, but the pattern is familiar: big capital inflows to small towns in exchange for promises to soften local environmental and fiscal impacts.
The project is one element of a far larger strategy. Meta plans a multi‑gigawatt Hyperion campus in Louisiana that the company says could ultimately exceed 5 gigawatts, and disclosed plans to spend as much as $135 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 (up from $72.2 billion in 2025). Competitors are making similar commitments — Google has signalled roughly $180 billion of spending in 2026 and Amazon around $200 billion — contributing to a sectorwide spike in capital expenditures that has unsettled investors and pressured peers’ share prices.
Financial backers are divided. While large capex plans prompted selloffs for some cloud and AI suppliers, activist investors have also bet on winners: Pershing Square disclosed a roughly $2 billion stake in Meta this week, arguing the company’s valuation understates its long‑term AI upside. The Lebanon announcement therefore sits at the intersection of corporate strategy, local politics and national energy planning, and will reverberate across supply chains for servers, power equipment and cooling systems.