Meta will more than double its Hyperion data center campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, raising total investment from $10 billion to as much as $50 billion and pushing the site toward 5 gigawatts of capacity, according to NOLA.com / The Times-Picayune's coverage. The expansion, reported by Stephanie Riegel on July 13, grows the site to more than 3,200 acres, pushes construction jobs to roughly 7,500, and sets up a jump to 1,000 permanent positions by the estimated 2036 completion date. None of that is the number a thermal engineer cares about.
Louisiana granted Meta a water permit covering as much as 23 million gallons a day, or 8.4 billion gallons a year, drawn from the Mississippi River Alluvial Aquifer. Meta's own projection for the facility once it is running in 2028 lands at 500 to 600 million gallons a year, roughly 1.5 million gallons a day. Do the math. That gap runs close to 14 times. Permits get sized for worst-case draw and redundancy days, a different calculus than an average Tuesday. A spread this wide still hands Meta room to scale water consumption hard without a second public hearing. The aquifer in question also feeds the farms and small towns around Holly Ridge.
Meta describes the cooling system as closed loop: coolant recirculates through the data halls and dry coolers, the same physics behind a car radiator scaled to industrial size, with makeup water needed mainly in the hottest stretches of the year. That loss compounds against 5 gigawatts of IT load and a compute ramp Mark Zuckerberg has pegged at 2 gigawatts initially, climbing toward 5 gigawatts over several years. Cooling water draw tracks that curve, not the press release. The water-power tradeoff data center operators keep getting wrong is exactly this: megawatts and gallons move together, and nobody publishes the ratio until a reporter asks for it.
It is a familiar shape. xAI pulled 812,502 gallons a day from Memphis's drinking water aquifer and disclosed it only after the fact. Meta published a number ahead of time, which is more than most operators do. That does not make the number durable once the racks fill in.
Entergy Louisiana has proposed seven new gas-fired power plants for this expansion, on top of three already under construction for the original buildout, adding 7,400 megawatts of gas generation alongside a 2,500-megawatt request for solar and wind. Meta is covering far more than the required half of that cost, under a 20-year agreement with the utility. Logan Burke of the Alliance for Affordable Energy called the proposal overwhelming: three plants tripled to ten in under a year. Paul Arbaje at the Union of Concerned Scientists puts the nitrogen oxide output from all ten plants running at roughly 450 million diesel bus miles a year. Neither Burke nor Arbaje has gotten a straight answer on what the cooling loop pulls once the site runs at full density. Meta's 1 GW build in the Chihuahuan Desert drew the same scrutiny over evaporative cooling in a water-stressed basin. Richland Parish sits in wetter country, but a shared aquifer under a site running at five times El Paso's capacity carries more risk, wrapped in better public relations.
Richland Parish's real test lands after 2028, when Meta's actual draw either tracks the 1.5-million-gallon estimate or climbs toward the permitted ceiling as each hardware refresh pushes rack density higher. Meta gets to answer that question for the aquifer. The farmers on the other side of Holly Ridge do not get a vote on which side of that gap the number settles.