Meta Unveils $10B Indiana Data Centre Campus

Meta Platforms has announced plans for a $10 billion, 1,000 MW data centre campus in Lebanon, Indiana - its second major facility in the state and one of the largest single-site investments in Meta's history. The campus will support Meta's expanding AI training infrastructure, including the next generation of large language models (successors to LLaMA), recommendation systems that power Instagram and Facebook's feeds, and the computational requirements of Meta's growing AI assistant products.

At 1,000 MW (1 GW), the Lebanon campus would consume roughly the same amount of electricity as a city of 750,000 people. This staggering power requirement illustrates the scale disconnect between AI infrastructure and traditional commercial real estate - a single data centre campus rivaling the electricity consumption of a mid-size city. Meta's total infrastructure investment in Indiana alone now exceeds $15 billion across its two campuses, making it one of the largest corporate investors in the state's history.

The Lebanon campus will create approximately 4,000 construction jobs during the multi-year build-out and several hundred permanent operational positions. Indiana has actively courted data centre investment with competitive incentive packages including property tax abatements, sales tax exemptions on equipment purchases, and streamlined permitting. The state's central US location provides low-latency connectivity to both East and West Coast markets, while Indiana's power costs (approximately $0.07/kWh from a mix of coal, natural gas, and growing renewable sources) are competitive with major data centre markets.

Meta's infrastructure strategy is the most concentrated among the major hyperscalers. While Microsoft and Google spread their investments across dozens of markets, Meta has chosen to build fewer but significantly larger campuses. This mega-campus approach - building 500-1,500 MW facilities rather than 50-100 MW facilities - enables economies of scale in construction, power procurement, and operations that smaller deployments cannot achieve. The trade-off is geographic concentration risk: a single event (grid failure, natural disaster, regulatory change) could affect a disproportionate share of Meta's total capacity.

The $10 billion price tag reflects the rapidly escalating cost of data centre construction. At approximately $10 million per MW, the Lebanon campus is near the current global average of $11.3 million per MW (per JLL). However, the actual cost per usable MW of AI compute capacity may be significantly higher, as Meta's AI training facilities require specialised liquid cooling, high-density power distribution, and GPU-optimised network fabrics that add substantial cost beyond basic shell-and-core construction.