Meta is building a large number of Gigawatt data centers by pouring billions into AI
Meta’s AI spending craze continues. After providing billions (or in some cases) millions of dollars to attract top researchers away from competing AI operations, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced through clues that the company plans to build several multi-gigawatt superclusters to boost its computing power.
Zuckerberg said the first super promoter known as Prometheus will be online sometime in 2026, and “multiple Titans” will follow. “One of them covers a vital part of the Manhattan footprint,” Zach said. Prometheus is being built in Ohio, according to a semi-analysis report by AI Research. Its other cluster, called Hyperion, is currently being built in Louisiana and is expected to be online in 2027.
A supercluster is an interconnected network of computing resources, including graphics processing units (GPUs) or tensor processing units (TPUs), designed to perform large-scale data processing required for training AI models. Most active clusters build hundreds of megawatts of power to support AI efforts. In theory, Meta’s Gigawatt method will improve it in terms of computing power, and Zuckerberg claims Meta’s speed is the first to bring supercollective to Gigawatt Localized Online.
Elon Musk may question this achievement. Earlier this year, he claimed that Xai was the AI project behind Grok and he was working on its next generation data center, which would be the “first Gigawatt AI training supergroup”. So, I think we’ve had an old-fashioned showdown to see who actually gets the data center online.
Musk’s projects in Memphis, Tennessee and Ohio have something in common, besides achieving Gigawatt’s goal of supercluster data centers: they all have some major environmental issues. With Musk’s construction in Memphis increasing, the company reportedly brought 35 portable methane gas turbines without an air permit to power the project. Turbos that can power 50,000 homes can also emit 130 tons of harmful nitrogen oxides per year.
Meta’s project in Ohio doesn’t seem to be cleaner. According to semi-analysis, Meta is building two separate 200MW on-site gas plants to help meet the energy needs of its data centers. While gas plants are cleaner than alternatives such as coal (the Trump administration gives AI companies, but if needed), they still produce a large amount of pollutants, including nitrogen oxides associated with increased risk of invading communities’ cancers.
Earlier this year, Zuckerberg promised to drop to $72 billion in AI projects to compete with the world’s OpenAIS and XAIS. It might be great if he spent a small portion of his time making sure these projects don’t seriously damage the quality of life for those living near the unfortunate center of life.
