(Bloomberg) -- Meta Platforms Inc. has committed to spending an additional $40 billion on its sprawling data center campus in Louisiana, pushing its total expected investment beyond $250 billion for the site as it continues to grow its artificial intelligence computing footprint.
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Meta announced Monday that it will expand the project in rural Louisiana to at least 5 gigawatts of computing power at a cost of $50 billion. It had previously announced a $10 billion investment for the data center and surrounding community.
Bloomberg News reported in May that Meta was planning to spend an additional $200 billion on the project, largely for the expensive computing chips that will go inside the nearly 4,000-acre campus. That brings an expected total for the site to at least a quarter-trillion dollars, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the financing details aren't yet public.
Meta hasn't publicly disclosed any expenses for the project beyond the $50 billion.
Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has spent aggressively in the past two years to build out the infrastructure, including data centers, that he believes is necessary to achieve AI superintelligence. The company has a total of 33 data centers built or in active development, and Zuckerberg has pledged to spend at least $600 billion on US infrastructure projects in the next few years. Last week, Meta committed to spending $10 billion on its first data center in Canada.
The Richland Parish, Louisiana-based data center is Meta's largest and most ambitious to date, and the high cost has led to additional financing by outside investors. Blue Owl Capital Inc., which owns an 80% stake in the project, has turned to Wall Street for billions to help fund construction. Entergy Louisiana, meanwhile, is spending billions to construct 10 new gas-fired power plants to supply the campus with electricity. While the data center will use 5 gigawatts of computing power, more than 2 gigawatts will serve the campus' broader electrical needs.
Zuckerberg, in an interview last week, said Meta is still seeking all the computing power that it can get. But the Facebook founder is also considering whether to rent some of that capacity to outsiders, and Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Meta is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business. The discussions have included plans to sell access to "raw" computing capacity, akin to other so-called neocloud businesses like CoreWeave Inc.