Meta Announces 5 GW Data Center to Power AI

­Meta is poised to stay ahead of the highly-competitive AI computing race – the multinational technology company, led by Mark Zuckerberg, just announced a new data center (“Hyperion”), which will allegedly supply Meta’s new AI lab with five gigawatts (GW) of computational power.

To train and power “frontier” AI models, companies will need super clusters like Hyperion, along with Meta’s previously announced “Prometheus”, a 1 GW super cluster set to go online in 2026.

According to Zuckerberg, Prometheus is the first of many, with “multiple more titan clusters” to follow. “Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan,” he said.

Meta AI, which launched in September 2023, is clearly designed to compete with competitors like OpenAI, Google, Deepseek, and Anthropic, and Zuckerberg claims Meta will bring the first supercluster with gigawatt capacity online, though Elon Musk also insists that xAI (his AI project behind Grok) would be the “first gigawatt AI training supercluster.”

For what it’s worth, this administration seems all-in on AI, with U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright saying the U.S. should “lead the next major energy-intensive frontier: artificial intelligence”, and that AI transforms electricity into the “most valuable output imaginable: intelligence.”

Let’s hope AI benefits humanity, because data centers – dominated by AI – will supposedly account for 20% of America’s energy consumption by 2030.