A gigawatt is not a rounding error.
It’s a location decision.
Meta has started construction on a new 1GW data center campus in Lebanon, Indiana, calling it one of the company’s largest infrastructure investments and putting the spend at more than $10 billion.
The announcement underscores a shift that’s getting harder to ignore: at AI scale, the constraint is not just the model. It’s the mix of land, power, and buildable infrastructure that lets you expand quickly.
A gigawatt, 4,000 builders, and a long runway
According to Meta’s announcement, the Lebanon campus is designed for 1GW of capacity and will support more than 4,000 construction jobs at peak and about 300 operational jobs once running.
Meta also put real numbers behind its local commitments. The company says it will provide $1 million each year for 20 years to the Boone REMC Community Fund to help local families with energy bills, and it plans to invest more than $120 million toward water infrastructure and other public infrastructure improvements, including roads and utility upgrades.
The tax break that made it pencil out
The incentives are a key part of why these projects land where they land. Indiana’s IEDC release describes a 35-year data center sales tax exemption tied to investment requirements, with the possibility of extending up to 50 years if Meta meets additional capital investment milestones.
Power and water
Meta is leaning hard into sustainability claims, where data center projects often get contentious. According to Meta, the company will match 100% of the data center’s electricity use with clean energy and target LEED Gold certification.
On water, Meta says the facility will use a closed-loop, liquid-cooled system that uses no water for most of the year. Meta also says it will restore 100% of the water it consumes in Lebanon to local watersheds, including a partnership with Arable that Meta says will deliver 200 million gallons of water per year for 10 years to the Upper Wabash River Basin.
Also read: Research linking AI’s footprint to major emissions is reshaping how teams think about scale.