Meta recently described just how gargantuan its AI data centers are becoming. Even I was shocked at how big these places will be.

Data centers are a vital part of the AI revolution, but they’re also raising a lot of concerns in local communities in the U.S. that don’t want them.

Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s Head of Infrastructure, talked at the recent AI Infra Summit about how Meta built and operated Prometheus, a huge one-gigawatt-scale AI supercluster, or high-end data center in New Albany, Ohio. His aim was to take the audience behind the scenes.

Now Janardhan said Meta plans to take the lessons of Prometheus to build a five-gigawatt scale AI supercluster in Louisiana. Prometheus serves as the foundation for Meta’s Superintelligence Labs effort to train and serve next-generation large language AI models.

Meta built and operated Prometheus, a distributed AI training cluster spanning thousands of acres. The campus includes dozens of buildings and hundreds of thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs). And Prometheus is far smaller than Hyperion, which Janardhan said will be a “Manhattan-sized” data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana.

Prometheus challenged the assumption that a training cluster must fit under one roof. In this case, the buildings were separated by three to five kilometers, with latency governed by distance at roughly five microseconds per kilometer, Janardhan said.

Meta deployed data-center-scale tents measuring roughly two to two and a half football fields, each providing 30 megawatts and built to withstand level-one hurricanes.

The tents reduced deployment time by 70% to 80%, shifting construction from years to months, while requirements were narrowed from a conventional data center to those needed specifically by a training cluster.

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