Spending on data centers topped US $27 billion by July 2025 and is expected to exceed $60 billion for the full year, with Meta's Hyperion accounting for about a quarter according to ConstructConnect (IEEE Spectrum, https://spectrum.ieee.org/5gw-data-center). The $10 billion project was announced in June 2025 and will cover a significant part of Manhattan's footprint (Mark Zuckerberg via IEEE Spectrum, https://spectrum.ieee.org/5gw-data-center). At least 5,000 temporary workers are required at the Richland Parish site, which has only about 20,000 permanent residents, as reported by NOLA.com (IEEE Spectrum, https://spectrum.ieee.org/5gw-data-center).

The largest challenge is often subsurface conditions, with unstable, corrosive or expansive soils requiring intervention and hundreds or thousands of soil samples before construction, according to Robert Haley, vice president at Jacobs (IEEE Spectrum, https://spectrum.ieee.org/5gw-data-center). Soil thermal conductivity is also critical because most electrical infrastructure is placed underground, per Amanda Carter, senior technical lead at Stantec (IEEE Spectrum, https://spectrum.ieee.org/5gw-data-center). Conventional reinforced concrete slab foundations and steel skeletons are used, though AI scale demands thicker concrete with more reinforcement.

Nvidia GB200 NVL72 rack-scale systems occupy a single rack with 72 GPUs, 36 CPUs and up to 13.4 terabytes of GPU memory, measuring over 2.2 meters tall and weighing over 1.5 tonnes while consuming up to 120 kilowatts (IEEE Spectrum, https://spectrum.ieee.org/5gw-data-center). A 5-GW campus could include over 41,000 such racks for a total of more than 3 million GPUs, though future GPUs will be more powerful (IEEE Spectrum, https://spectrum.ieee.org/5gw-data-center). Prefabricated concrete panels now span up to 23 meters and handle loads up to 3,000 kilograms per square meter, more than twice normal international building codes for industry, per Doug Bevier of Clark Pacific (IEEE Spectrum, https://spectrum.ieee.org/5gw-data-center).