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Meta’s AI Buildout Will Require More Than 2 Gigawatts of New Gas-Fired Electricity — At Least

CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.

Electrical outlets and a computer chip
Justin Renteria/Getty Images

Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.

“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis.

That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.

At the end of last year, Zuckerberg said that a datacenter project in Northeast Louisiana, now publicly known as Hyperion, would take 2 gigawatts of electricity; in his post on Monday, he said it could eventually be as large as 5 gigawatts. To get a sense of the scale we’re talking about, a new, large nuclear reactor has about a gigawatt of capacity, while a newly built natural gas plant could supply only around 500 megawatts.

As one could perhaps infer from the fact that their size is quoted in gigawatts instead of square feet or number of GPUs, whether or not these data centers get built comes down to the ability to power them.

Citing information from the natural gas company Williams, Semianalysis reported that Meta “went full Elon mode” for the New Albany datacenter, i.e. is installed its own natural gas infrastructure. Specifically, Williams is building two 200-megawatt facilities, according to the gas developer and Semianalysis, for the Ohio project. (Williams did not immediately respond to a Heatmap request for comment.)

Does this mean Meta is violating its commitments to reach net zero? While the data center buildout may make those goals more difficult to achieve, Meta is still investing in new renewables even as it’s also bringing new gas online. Late last month, the company announced that it was procuring almost 800 new megawatts of renewables from projects to be built by Invenergy, including over 400 megawatts of solar in Ohio, roughly matching the on-site generation from the Prometheus project.

But there’s more to a data center’s climate footprint than what a big tech company does — or does not — build on site.

The Louisiana project, Hyperion, will also be served by new natural gas and renewables added to the grid. Entergy, the local utility, has proposed 1.5 gigawatts of natural gas generation near the Meta site and over 2 gigawatts of new natural gas in total, with another plant in the southern part of the state to help balance the addition of significant new load. In December, when the data center was announced, Meta said that it planned to “bring at least 1,500 megawatts of new renewable energy to the grid.” Entergy did not immediately respond to a Heatmap request for comment on its plans for the Hyperion project.

“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher. I'm looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!” Zuckerberg wrote.

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Sparks

Interior Order Chokes Off Permits for Solar and Wind on Federal Lands

The department creates a seemingly impossible new permitting criteria for renewable energy.

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John McDonnell/Getty Images

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Interest rate relief isn’t coming anytime soon for renewables. As widely expected, the Federal Reserve chose to keep rates unchanged on Wednesday, despite intense pressure from President Trump and two Republican Fed governors to lower rates.

The Fed maintained the benchmark short term rate at a range of 4.25% to 4.5%. During the press conference that followed the rate announcement, Fed Chair Jerome Powell gave no indication that the board will lower rates at the Fed’s next meeting in September, either. That’s contrary to Trump’s claims to reporters after the meeting. “We have made no decisions about September,” Powell said. “We don’t do that in advance. We’ll be taking that information into consideration and all the other information we get as we make our decision.”

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After Trump Phone Call, DOE Cancels $5 Billion for Grain Belt Express

The Department of Energy announced Wednesday that it was scrapping the loan guarantee.

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“After a thorough review of the project’s financials, DOE found that the conditions necessary to issue the guarantee are unlikely to be met and it is not critical for the federal government to have a role in supporting this project. To ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources, DOE has terminated its conditional commitment,” the Department of Energy said in a statement Wednesday.

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