Meta инвестирует 200 млрд в дата-центр в Луизиане: инвесторы требуют доказательств

Meta is betting on the future. The company is investing $200 billion in building a giant data center in rural Louisiana to provide computing power for its AI models.

The

Megaproject in Louisiana The data center in rural Louisiana will be one of Meta's largest in history. This is not just an office or storage facility — it is infrastructure for training and running large language models. The company believes that such scale is necessary to compete with OpenAI, Google, and other AI market leaders.

The size of the investment is simply colossal for any company. $200 billion is more than the annual income of many tech startups, more than the GDP of dozens of countries. For comparison: this is roughly as much as Apple spends on R&D over five years.

Meta chose Louisiana because of cheap electricity (the region is suitable due to local hydroelectric power plants and gas generators) and low land costs — factors critical for data centers that consume gigawatts per second. The project will span thousands of hectares. On this territory will be placed cooling buildings, electrical substations, network centers.

It will be a small city, but instead of people — machines and servers.

Why

Investors Are Worried The main question is simple: will this ever pay off?

• Data centers take a long time to build — 2-3 years minimum, and then require constant maintenance Electricity is the main expense item, with bills reaching billions of dollars per year The result depends entirely on the success of Meta's AI products and demand for computing power Competition from OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Microsoft is growing and becoming fiercer An oversupply of computing capacity could form, which would drive down prices Investors demand transparency. How will Meta turn data center capacity into revenue? Will it sell computing power to companies? Monetize through ads in AI assistants? Offer cloud services? For now, the financial plan remains unclear. Analysts point to historical precedent: Amazon spent huge sums on cloud infrastructure AWS and recouped its investments through third-party service sales. But then there was not such fierce competition and rapid technological change.

Strategy and

Timeline Meta announced the project in a quarterly report to investors — a bold move taking full responsibility. The data center should partially start operations in 2027, fully launch by the end of 2028. During this time, the company hopes to accumulate enough data and experience to calculate ROI. In parallel, Meta is trying to reduce costs. Engineers are optimizing power consumption of chips and algorithms. Each percent of savings on electricity — this is hundreds of millions per year at such scale.

"Investments in infrastructure are investments in the future,"

Meta said in its financial report. The company is also lobbying the state for electricity and tax benefits. Louisiana has already agreed to a number of preferences — the local government sees jobs and rural development in the project.

What This Means The AI race is escalating to a critical point.

For Meta, this is an all-or-nothing bet: either the data center pays off with huge profits from AI services and market dominance, or the company spends a decade recouping its investment. For investors and the technology industry, this is a signal: AI infrastructure is becoming the key resource. Companies are willing to take big risks. *Meta is recognized as an extremist organization and is banned in the Russian Federation.