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Appears in 17 stories

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Meta's Hyperion AI campus rises in rural Louisiana

Built World

Expanding Hyperion campus with 1,400-acre Phase 2 acquisition; owns 20% of the joint venture

Meta's Hyperion data center, a $27 billion AI campus rising in rural Richland Parish, Louisiana, is on track to become the largest facility of its kind in history. Meta has quietly bought enough land to more than double it. The initial 2,250-acre, 4-million-square-foot build will deliver 2 to 5 gigawatts of computing power, enough to train the next generations of Llama. The financing is the biggest private-credit deal ever executed and the single largest private investment in Louisiana history. In February 2026, Fortune revealed Meta's quiet purchase of another 1,400 adjacent acres, setting up a Phase 2 that would roughly double the campus footprint.

Updated 3 days ago

Big tech's half-trillion-dollar AI bet

Money Moves

Q1 2026 earnings April 29: ad business accelerating, AI coding tools driving 30% engineer productivity gains; $115-135B 2026 capex maintained; TBD Lab hiring former OpenAI Stargate leaders

The four largest cloud providers—Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon—are tracking toward over $720 billion in combined AI infrastructure spending for 2026, up sharply from $410 billion in 2025. All four reported first-quarter results on April 29, 2026. Microsoft delivered the clearest signal: $77.7 billion in revenue (up 18% year-over-year), Azure cloud growth of 40% (above its 37% guidance), and earnings per share of $4.13 versus analyst estimates of $3.67.

Updated 3 days ago

Big tech faces trial over youth addiction claims

Rule Changes

Lead defendant in bellwether trial

The Los Angeles bellwether trial testing social media liability for addictive design features began jury selection January 27 and opened February 9. It's the first time major tech companies face a jury over claims their products harm children's mental health.

Updated 6 days ago

Supreme Court to define who counts as a 'consumer' under video privacy law

Rule Changes

Third party in VPPA litigation wave

Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act in 1988 after a reporter published Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's video rental history. Thirty-eight years later, the law has become the basis for hundreds of class action lawsuits against media companies using tracking pixels on their websites—and the Supreme Court just agreed to decide who can sue under it.

Updated 6 days ago

The race to build AI's physical foundation

Built World

Planning $135B+ infrastructure investment in 2026 with Nvidia + AMD GPU diversification, 7+ GW capacity

ChatGPT's November 2022 launch triggered the fastest infrastructure buildout in tech history. Hyperscalers are now on track to spend over $1 trillion in 2026, exceeding the GDP of all but 10 countries.

Updated May 19

The AI reasoning revolution

New Capabilities

Open-source AI leader with internal tensions over reasoning approaches

OpenAI's GPT-5 dropped August 7, 2025, completing AI's shift from chatbots that string words together to systems that think through problems step-by-step. Google DeepMind's models won the International Math Olympiad by solving problems only five humans cracked, as Anthropic's Claude, Meta's Llama, and every major AI lab raced to build reasoning models.

Updated May 19

Meta's trump pivot

Rule Changes

Implementing major content moderation policy shifts

Mark Zuckerberg banned Donald Trump after January 6th, calling the risks of keeping him on Facebook too great. Four years later, on the ban's anniversary, Zuckerberg killed Meta's entire U.S. fact-checking program, amid a Mar-a-Lago visit, a million-dollar inauguration donation, and elevation of a Bush-era Republican to Meta's top policy role.

Updated May 19

Big Tech's power grab: the race to build private energy empires

New Capabilities

Securing up to 6.6 GW nuclear capacity via Vistra, TerraPower, Oklo deals

Google spent $4.75 billion over a year ago acquiring Intersect Power, owning power plants that feed its AI data centers. Amazon bought a Pennsylvania nuclear campus; Microsoft restarted Three Mile Island in September 2024; Meta announced nuclear deals with Vistra, TerraPower, Oklo unlocking up to 6.6 gigawatts for American AI. Tech giants now control the grid.

Updated May 16

Meta kills Messenger’s native desktop apps, forcing a web-only future on Mac and Windows

Rule Changes

Owner of Messenger; driving a web-first desktop posture and retiring native clients

On December 15, 2025, Meta effectively bricked Messenger's standalone desktop apps: no more logins, no native client. Users got pushed to Messenger.com or Facebook.com.

Updated May 15

Big Tech reshapes workforces to fund AI buildout

Money Moves

Restructuring around AI; eliminating 14,000 positions in 2026

Meta will cut 8,000 jobs on May 20 and scrap 6,000 open roles it had planned to fill. HR head Janelle Gale framed the layoffs as the price of Meta's $145 billion AI infrastructure bill, with more cuts planned for the second half of 2026.

Updated May 13

AI data centers are rebuilding – and stress-testing – the U.S. power grid

Built World

Became one of largest corporate nuclear buyers in U.S. history while facing criticism for gas plant in Texas

Since late 2022, U.S. regulators and utilities have warned that AI-optimized data centers could reshape national power demand, ending an era of flat electricity consumption and forcing rapid buildout of generation and transmission. By early 2026, those warnings have crystallized into concrete challenges. PJM Interconnection's December 2025 capacity auction hit the $333.44/MW-day price cap and failed to meet reliability requirements for the first time in its history. Data centers accounted for $6.5 billion—or 40%—of the auction's $16.4 billion in costs.

Updated May 10

Apple’s stable C–Suite hits turbulence as AI missteps, talent war and succession loom

Money Moves

Key competitor aggressively poaching Apple’s AI and design talent

After more than a decade of executive stability under CEO Tim Cook, Apple experienced its largest leadership shake-up since the post–Steve Jobs reorganization, spanning from March 2025 into early 2026. The company repeatedly delayed its flagship Apple Intelligence upgrade to Siri, signaling strategic and engineering problems.

Updated May 10

Europe’s big tech crackdown under the DSA and DMA

Rule Changes

Subject to GDPR, DMA and fresh antitrust probes over data and AI policies

The European Union is cracking down on U.S.-based Big Tech using the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, and long-standing competition and privacy rules. Since 2023, Brussels designated six platforms as 'gatekeepers,' imposed obligations on core services, and opened proceedings against X, Google, Apple and Meta for monopolistic conduct, opaque algorithms, deceptive design, and failures to police harmful content.

Updated May 10

Meta books 1 gigawatt of space-based solar power for AI data centers

Built World

First announced commercial buyer of space-based solar power

Engineer Peter Glaser patented space solar power in 1973. For five decades it stayed theoretical; on April 27, 2026, Meta signed a 1-gigawatt capacity reservation with Virginia startup Overview Energy and became the first announced commercial buyer of orbital electricity.

Updated May 9

Arm shifts from chip licensor to chipmaker for AI data centers

Money Moves

Lead launch customer, deploying AGI CPU alongside its MTIA AI accelerators

For 35 years, Arm Holdings sold blueprints, not chips. Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia and Amazon paid Arm to license its processor designs, then made the silicon themselves. On May 6, 2026, Arm formalized a different future: a $15 billion direct chip-sales business by fiscal 2031, anchored by an in-house data center processor called the Arm AGI CPU. Customer demand for the chip has already doubled to more than $2 billion for fiscal years 2027–2028 since the March 24 launch, and an IBM collaboration announced in April extended the AGI CPU's reach toward enterprise mainframes.

Updated May 7

Indiana stakes billions on an industrial mega-district that doesn't have enough water

Built World

Broke ground on $10B data center campus in February 2026

Indiana committed over $23 billion in private investment to a 9,500-acre industrial district in Boone County farmland before solving a basic problem: where the water would come from. Now the state is advancing a $560 million plan to pipe up to 25 million gallons per day from Indianapolis to supply Eli Lilly's $9 billion pharmaceutical campus and Meta's $10 billion data center complex, despite objections from Indianapolis lawmakers, environmental groups, and hundreds of property owners along the pipeline route.

Updated Apr 15

The race to build frontier AI

New Capabilities

Flagship AI model delayed; weighing licensing rival's technology

Meta Platforms has committed more money to artificial intelligence than any other company in history—up to $135 billion in 2026 alone, and $600 billion in American data center infrastructure by 2028. But money hasn't bought capability. The company's next-generation AI model, code-named Avocado, was delayed from March to at least May 2026 after internal tests showed it trailing systems already shipping from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic on reasoning, coding, and writing tasks.

Updated Mar 13