Alice (@shalanda88.bsky.social)

I went to rural Louisiana to see Meta's massive $27 billion AI data center. Here's what I found. Reporting on the ground in northeast Louisiana last month, where Meta is building its massive Hyperion AI data center on over 2,250 acres of former farmland, I was struck by a street sign just minutes from soybean fields, grain silos, and grazing cows. The sign, marking a newly-built road leading into the construction site, carries an appropriate name: Far Far Away Lane. The nod to Star Wars hints at a new frontier, but the Meta site is so disorientingly vast that what’s happening there feels less like sci-fi and more like the early stages of a city rising from the dirt. The site is five miles long and a mile wide at some points, steel frames jut from the ground, heavy machinery operates around the clock, and an endless stream of trucks pours in before sunrise, feeding a project where thousands of workers in hardhats and neon vests swarm. Residents complain about damage to their vehicles from rocks kicked up by the trucks hurtling to and from the Meta site. Something enormous and unfamiliar has landed in rural Richland Parish, and it represents not just Meta’s stratospheric AI ambitions, but the financial, energy-hungry reality of building the infrastructure that underpins... https://fortune.com/2026/03/26/inside-metas-chaotic-ai-boomtown-in-rural-louisiana/