A four-building campus in Texas, and a five-gigawatt target in Louisiana
Amazon is planning Project Eagle in Wharton County; Meta is expanding Hyperion into a 5 GW supercluster. Both are sited where power is, not where customers are.
Amazon is planning Project Eagle, a four-building data centre campus in Wharton County, Texas. Meta is expanding its Hyperion campus in northeast Louisiana into what it describes as a 5 GW AI supercluster.
Five gigawatts is the number to sit with. That is utility-scale generation dedicated to one company's compute, in a state whose entire grid is a fraction of that. Facilities at this scale are not tenants on a grid; they are a reason to build generation.
The siting logic has inverted from the previous generation of data centres. Those were placed for latency — near users, near exchanges, near fibre. These are placed for power availability, land, and the willingness of a state to permit quickly. Training does not care about a few milliseconds; it cares about whether the building can draw what it needs continuously.
That inversion has consequences the industry has not priced. Rural counties hosting multi-gigawatt loads acquire a single dominant ratepayer, and the local politics of that — water for cooling, transmission easements, who pays for grid upgrades — has been a growing source of friction in every state where these get proposed.
It is the physical expression of the metric shift on the earnings calls. When the constraint is energy, you build where the energy is and let the network reach you.
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