Reporting notebook: On the ground at Meta's 5-mile long Hyperion AI data center in Louisiana

The mammoth, sprawling construction site definitely seems like a galaxy far, far away, but it's being built right here on earth—in a rural community in northeast Louisiana

I returned last night from a reporting trip to Richland Parish, a rural county in northeast Louisiana, where cotton and soybean fields have been replaced by a mammoth-sized Meta AI data center called Hyperion, that is so large that it even has its own street cutting through the site called Far Far Away Lane, as you can see from the above photo.

But this was no galaxy far far away, but right here in the US, so I was dying to see it for myself — and I am also working on the second story in a series of articles about the AI data center boom and how it is impacting communities around the US (the first, a story about a project in Arizona, ran in December — here’s a gift link). The new piece will publish on Fortune online and in the next print issue. Stay tuned!

But meanwhile, I thought I’d share some nuggets about my trip to this incredibly welcoming and tight-knit community which, by the way, suffered intense damage from a heavy ice storm last week and is still recovering. There were downed trees and power lines everywhere you looked and there were many people in the area that still didn’t have power or were still in clean-up/recovery mode. I was amazed how they all pulled together to help each other through the crisis.

As for the Meta site itself, I’ve been scouring the thesaurus, trying to land on the right word to describe just how large, loud, and chaotic this 2250-acre construction site is. Colossal? Mammoth? Sprawling? Let’s put it this way: it takes a while just to drive the length of the site—it stretches roughly five miles from top to bottom, and is another mile or so wide.

I get the feeling some parts will be quite tall, too:

Oh, and there’s an elementary school ball-throwing distance from the construction site:

Meta’s Hyperion is quietly getting even bigger

During that drive, I discovered that Hyperion is getting even bigger. While the expansion had long been suspected—and was something of an open secret among some locals—I confirmed for a Fortune scoop that Meta has quietly purchased roughly 1,400 additional acres, an area nearly twice the size of Manhattan’s Central Park, adjacent to its already-mega 2,250-acre campus. I also observed active construction underway on the newly acquired land—when I wasn’t worrying about getting mowed down by the endless parade of 18-wheelers hauling materials in and around the site.

I had help on my trip — thank goodness, because it was much harder driving around the site than I thought. My husband served as chauffeur, while I took videos of (part) of the perimeter like this one:

I also had amazing help from a local community journalist and activist named Amber Perez, and her friend Erika — the two met doing community work to get help to Richland Parish residents after the ice storm. We had a blast touring the site and eating red beans and rice and chicken at Opal’s Orange Food Truck that serves some of the thousands of workers on the construction site:

Overall, the Richland Parish community was incredibly welcoming and I wish I could have stayed longer to eat more amazing food, have more amazing chats and see more of this beautiful area.

I’ll have much more to share about this part of the AI data center boom in my upcoming feature, hopefully with amazing photos and video to accompany it.

Meanwhile, back to the rest of the AI news cycle — have a great weekend.