Most megaprojects in this country are fighting to hold scope. Meta's Richland Parish campus has done the opposite three times.
December 2024: a $10 billion data center in rural northeast Louisiana. October 2025: $27 billion. July 13, 2026: more than $50 billion committed to the region, 5 gigawatts of compute, nearly 10 million square feet at full build, and two additional general contractors brought on to help deliver it. Meta says Hyperion will be the largest AI training cluster in its global fleet.
For contractors, a project that grows five times in nineteen months is a different animal from one that holds a fixed budget. The bid list keeps reopening, the trade packages keep getting re-scoped, and the labor draw keeps climbing on a schedule nobody published.
How the number got here
| Date | Committed investment | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| December 2024 | $10 billion | Project announced, ground broken |
| October 2025 | $27 billion | Scope expanded, Entergy generation plan expanded with it |
| July 2026 | More than $50 billion | 5 GW capacity confirmed, Turner and Mortenson added as GCs |
Meta's own July 2026 statement describes more than $50 billion invested in the Richland Parish region and puts peak construction at over 7,500 skilled trade workers, with roughly 1,000 permanent operational roles once the campus is running. Do not read that as a building cost. Conventional data center construction costs run roughly $600 to $1,500 per square foot, and the Richland Parish figure covers generation, transmission and IT hardware alongside the shells — which is why dividing $50 billion by 10 million square feet produces a number no estimator should carry into a bid.
There is no published completion date for the full campus. Entergy has described construction employment tied to its side of the work running from 2026 through 2031, which is the closest thing to a public end date anyone has offered.
Three general contractors on one campus
This is the part that should interest anyone who manages field logistics.
| Contractor | Scope |
|---|---|
| DPR Construction | First phase |
| Turner Construction Company | Expansion phases |
| Mortenson | Expansion phases |
Meta named all three directly. Running three national GCs in parallel on a single campus is not common even at hyperscale, and it exists for a straightforward reason: no single builder has the bonding, the staff, or the subcontractor bench to absorb a five-times scope increase without becoming the constraint. Splitting the campus buys parallel capacity and three independent subcontractor networks instead of one.
What it costs is coordination. Three GCs on one site means three sets of site logistics plans, three badging and safety programs, three laydown and crane strategies, and three separate demands on the same regional concrete supply, the same aggregate haul routes, and the same craft labor pool. The concrete draw is the one that binds first: a hyperscale campus can consume 50,000 or more cubic yards through 12- to 18-inch data hall slabs, and three builders pouring on overlapping schedules are competing for the same batch plants inside the same haul radius. Someone on the owner's side has to arbitrate all of it, and the interface management on a campus like this is a full-time program in its own right.
For a subcontractor, the practical implication is that there are three front doors, not one. Prequalifying with DPR does not put you on Turner's or Mortenson's list. If you want work on this campus, you chase all three.
The power project hiding inside the building project
The construction story people miss here is that Meta is not just funding a campus. It is funding what amounts to a private utility program wrapped around it, delivered by Entergy Louisiana.
The scope Meta is paying for includes:
- Seven new natural gas-fueled generating plants
- Approximately 240 miles of new 500 kV transmission line, connecting generation resources in South Louisiana to the campus in North Louisiana
- Grid-scale battery energy storage at three locations
Entergy has put the cost of the 500 kV line alone at roughly $1.2 billion. Under the revised agreement with the Louisiana Public Service Commission, the buildout adds about 5.2 gigawatts of gas-fired generation to the state grid alongside about 2.5 gigawatts of new solar capacity. Entergy now forecasts $2.65 billion in customer benefits, up from an earlier $650 million estimate, and Meta is contributing $215 million toward bill assistance and efficiency programs. Meta has separately committed to procuring 2.5 GW of clean and renewable energy.
Read that list again as a construction scope rather than a policy announcement. Seven gas plants means seven separate industrial projects with their own boilermaker, millwright, and pipefitter demand. Two hundred forty miles of 500 kV means transmission structures, foundations, right-of-way clearing, access roads, stringing crews, and two substation-heavy terminal ends. Three BESS sites mean civil pads, containerized equipment set, and medium-voltage collection. None of that is data center work, and all of it competes for the same crews and the same crane fleet in the same six-parish area.
The conductor content on 240 miles of high-voltage line and the switchgear content on a 5 GW campus put real exposure on metals pricing over a five-year build, which is worth tracking against the copper index rather than a one-time bid assumption.
Cooling, and what it does to mechanical scope
Meta describes the Richland Parish halls as using a closed-loop system circulating a glycol mixture, with dry cooling for most of the year. The campus is targeting LEED Gold.
For mechanical contractors, closed-loop glycol with dry cooling shifts the scope away from evaporative equipment, cooling towers, and heavy make-up water infrastructure, and toward glycol piping distribution, dry cooler arrays, pumping, and controls. It also removes a permitting fight that has slowed comparable projects in water-stressed regions. If you are bidding mechanical on hyperscale AI campuses generally, the glycol closed-loop approach and the closed-loop non-evaporative designs showing up on other AI campuses are the same directional bet: trade water consumption for electrical load and heat rejection surface area.
Where 7,500 craft workers come from
Meta's own materials list the trades it needs during construction and operations: electricians, HVAC specialists, server and network technicians, safety professionals, and engineers. In a rural parish, the honest answer is that most of that headcount travels in.
Meta has funded the gap directly:
- $115 million committed to America's Workforce Academy, its skilled trades training and hiring initiative. The program runs four to five weeks, covers skills including electrical work and fiber optics, and graduates receive a conditional job offer to work on future Meta data centers. Louisiana is one of four 2026 pilot locations, alongside Indiana, Texas, and Ohio.
- $5 million to Louisiana Delta Community College, described as the largest gift in that college's history, plus full scholarships for Richland Parish high school graduates starting with the class of 2026 to pursue data center trade certificates.
- University of Louisiana Monroe reported construction management enrollment up 37% year over year.
Whether a four-to-five-week program produces a journeyman-equivalent electrician is a fair debate, and contractors on the ground will settle it before the trade press does. What is not debatable is that a project needing 7,500 craft workers in a parish this rural has to manufacture part of its own labor supply, and Meta is one of the few owners spending real money to try. Regional labor concentration effects show up in our state construction dashboards.
Local spend and the front door for subcontractors
Meta reports more than $1.6 billion contracted with Louisiana businesses since construction began, and has designated Source Louisiana as the default subcontracting platform for the project. That platform designation is the single most actionable fact in this article for a Louisiana sub: it is where the packages surface.
Separately, Meta has committed about $1 billion toward local infrastructure improvements covering roads, water, and wastewater. That work runs through public agencies, which means it is competitively procured heavy-civil and utility work rather than private hyperscale scope. Firms that will never win a data center package can absolutely win the road and utility work around it, and those solicitations show up on our bid board.
What to watch
Whether a fourth GC gets added. Meta went from one to three in nineteen months. If the campus expands again, capacity, not money, is the constraint.
The transmission schedule. The campus cannot run past its interconnection. If the 500 kV program slips, energization dates slip with it, and building shells finish ahead of power. That sequencing risk is the one to watch on any project where an owner is funding its own transmission.
Rate-case politics. Meta's cost share, the customer-benefit forecast, and the gas plant approvals are all live regulatory matters. A regulatory reversal is a schedule event for the contractors, not just a headline for the ratepayers.
