One of the largest data center projects ever proposed covers a roughly 5.7-square-mile stretch of farmland in the Louisiana Delta hamlet of Holly Ridge. When it is finally completed at a cost of $27 billion—if it is finally completed—it will house 11 buildings and hundreds of thousands of GPUs and produce enough electricity to power New Orleans three times over. The project, named Hyperion after a Titan from Greek mythology, will “unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership,” Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg declared in a Facebook post after returning from President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025—which is another way of saying it may someday power chatbots. The site, he boasted, “is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.” To underscore the point, Zuckerberg helpfully attached an illustration: a jagged lavender rectangle, stretching from the bottom of Harlem to the top of SoHo.

But the thing about building a data center this big is you cannot simply build a data center—you must build a world to go with it. You need three new power plants and transmission lines to connect them to the grid. You need hundreds of millions of gallons of water and miles of pipes. You must pave roads and build new ones, clear fields, and build ponds. You need a port to bring in gravel and dirt from wherever you can get it. You need stoplights and sheriff’s deputies and laundromats. You need thousands of workers and places to house them—executive lodging, cheap motels, and man camps with movie theaters and gyms. Pecan groves will become RV lots; homes will become parking lots or a Dollar General or food truck parks.

When I visited Holly Ridge last November, nearly a year after the project was first announced, the surrounding parish was ­experiencing a speculative frenzy. It felt like everything that had not already flipped was on the market—and everyone who had not sold out or been priced out was cashing in or thinking about it.

If the economic story of the last two decades was the consolidation of wealth and power in Silicon Valley, the story of the last few years is what tech billionaires want to do with it. Since the summer of 2024, America’s richest men have been on a building spree with few precedents in recent history. The scale of the investment, in the hopes of winning the race to create artificial general intelligence (or AGI), is so vast that proponents have turned to previous eras of reckless extraction and technological advancement to describe it. Energy Secretary Chris Wright called it “Manhattan Project 2.” It is one of the largest investments of private capital since the transcontinental railroads. Expenditures for AI data centers amounted to about a quarter of all GDP growth in the first half of 2025, with the largest companies collectively spending $400 billion on construction projects—many of which won’t be fully operational for years.