Meta Hyperion and Prometheus: Meta's AI data centers explained

The Meta Hyperion data center is the AI training cluster Meta is building at its Richland Parish site in northeast Louisiana, which Meta said on July 13, 2026 it is expanding to 5 GW of compute capacity. Prometheus is its sister cluster in New Albany, Ohio, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described as the company’s first cluster of more than 1 GW. On October 19, 2026, Meta said the first phase of Prometheus is complete and was used to train its Muse models.

They are the two large clusters Meta has named for training its AI models. This explainer draws only on Meta’s own newsroom, engineering blog, data center pages and investor materials.

Two clusters, two roles

Meta’s investor materials describe the two projects together. On the company’s second-quarter 2025 earnings call on July 30, 2025, Zuckerberg said: “Our Prometheus cluster is coming online next year and we think it’ll be the world’s first 1GW+ cluster. We’re also building out Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years. And we have multiple more titan clusters in development as well.”

The two differ in timing and scale. Prometheus came first, in a town where Meta has run a data center campus since 2017; Meta said in October 2026 that its first phase is finished and that it is scaling the cluster toward about 1 million GPUs. Hyperion is on a new site in Louisiana that Meta describes as its largest data center to date, built out over several years.

Hyperion: Richland Parish, Louisiana

Meta announced the Richland Parish Data Center in December 2024 and broke ground the same month. Its data center page says the site will house Hyperion, “our largest multi-gigawatt AI cluster.” Meta has described the campus as covering four million square feet, built by three general contractors: Turner Construction, DPR Construction and Mortenson.

The 5 GW expansion. On July 13, 2026, Meta announced that it is expanding the Richland Parish site to 5 GW of compute capacity. In the same post Meta said:

• the expansion is an investment of more than $50 billion in the Richland Parish region;
• it will invest more than $1 billion in local infrastructure, including roads, water and wastewater systems;
• Louisiana businesses have received more than $1.6 billion in contracts since ground was broken;
• the data center will provide more than 1,000 roles once operational.

Meta’s data center page adds a peak construction workforce of more than 7,500 skilled trade workers.

Financing. On October 21, 2025, Meta and funds managed by Blue Owl Capital formed a joint venture to develop and own the Hyperion campus. Blue Owl’s funds hold 80% and Meta 20%. The partners committed to fund their shares of about $27 billion in development costs for the buildings and the long-lived power, cooling and connectivity infrastructure. Blue Owl’s funds contributed about $7 billion in cash, and Meta received a one-time distribution of about $3 billion. Meta provides construction and property management and has operating leases on the facilities with a four-year initial term and options to extend. The $27 billion figure predates the July 2026 expansion.

Power and cooling. Meta says it pays the full cost of the energy, water and related infrastructure the site uses. Its July 2026 post says Meta’s latest agreement with Entergy will fund seven new natural gas-fueled generating plants, three grid-scale batteries, nuclear uprates and other purchased power. For cooling, Meta’s data center page describes a closed-loop system that circulates a glycol mixture through the data halls and removes heat with dry cooling for most of the year.

Design. In its October 19, 2026 Prometheus post, Meta said Hyperion is being designed “from the ground up with insights from Prometheus in mind,” with closed-loop liquid cooling, full grid connectivity with Entergy, and next-generation network designs.

Prometheus: New Albany, Ohio

Meta has operated a data center campus in New Albany since breaking ground there in 2017 and has invested more than $1.5 billion in Ohio. Meta’s Ohio page lists $157 million of that in transmission and grid upgrades and $3 million in water and wastewater improvements.

First phase complete. Zuckerberg’s July 2025 earnings remarks put Prometheus at more than 1 GW, coming online in 2026. On October 19, 2026, Meta’s engineers published a detailed account of the cluster. Meta said:

• the first phase of the gigawatt-scale supercluster is complete and was used to train the Muse foundational models, including the Muse Wonder models;
• Prometheus today has hundreds of thousands of GPUs across multiple buildings, including traditional and AI-optimized data center buildings and rapid-deployment structures, plus capacity leased from partners;
• at full scale it will comprise roughly 1 million GPUs;
• it runs two Nvidia platforms, Catalina (GB200 NVL72) and Clemente (GB300 NVL72), with a third, San Miguel, based on Vera Rubin NVL72, arriving soon;
• a backend aggregation network links the building-level fabrics over distances from 2 km to more than 100 km;
• training interruptions fell 99% from their peak during the first phase.

Two years earlier, Meta said, New Albany was a conventional data center site running web traffic. A separate Meta post on the same day says Prometheus uses closed-loop cooling racks.

Nuclear power for the grid around Prometheus. On January 9, 2026, Meta announced agreements with Vistra, TerraPower and Oklo that it said will deliver power to the grids supporting its operations, “including our Prometheus supercluster in New Albany, Ohio.” Meta put the total at up to 6.6 GW of new and existing clean energy by 2035:

• Vistra: 20-year agreements to buy more than 2.1 GW from the Perry and Davis-Besse nuclear plants in Ohio, plus energy from uprates at those two plants and at Beaver Valley in Pennsylvania.
• Oklo: an advanced nuclear campus in Pike County, Ohio, of up to 1.2 GW, which “may come online as early as 2030.”
• TerraPower: funding for two Natrium units of up to 690 MW, with delivery as early as 2032, and rights to up to six more units totaling 2.1 GW, targeted by 2035.

Where the two projects fit

Hyperion and Prometheus are not Meta’s only gigawatt-scale sites. In February 2026 Meta broke ground on a 1 GW campus in Lebanon, Indiana, an investment of more than $10 billion, and in July 2026 it began a 1 GW data center in Sturgeon County, Alberta, its first in Canada. Those sites are tracked alongside Richland Parish in our AI data centers tracker; the Louisiana record is Meta Richland Parish data center expansion.

Key dates