Meta is redefining the term, "megaproject"... and people are asking the wrong questions
Posted: 13th February 2026
Hi all,
Feel free to share this!... in fact, PLEASE share this!!
A bit dramatic, but this is the best summary of Meta’s ‘Hyperion’
project I’ve yet seen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuJGgmhKqyQ
I’ve been following the data centre build-out over the last few years because it merges three of my main research themes: The environment, civil liberties, and computers.
Google, and Palantir/Amazon, are also following this line/scale of development.
Hyperion’s main site will draw up to 5GW when complete. To put that into perspective, Britain’s total generating capacity is a little over 70GW, and the largest power station was Drax, which at its peak generated 3.9GW. At full build Hyperion also requires 23 million US gallons of water a day to cool it - about 87Ml/day, roughly the water consumption of Leeds or Liverpool. In comparison, the power consumption of Europe’s largest proposed data centre, the DC01UK project just approved at South Mimms in Hertfordshire, is just 0.36GW!! using all the data Facebroke and others collect on individuals
I know people think AI is about slop videos, but if you seriously directed that level of compute power against civil society -- ‘they’ could could do some hard-core disinformation, psychological oppression, or at the very least cracking the passwords/signatures that protect people’s digital lives. And not unsurprisingly, Meta IS ACTIVELY pursuing contracts with the US government to undertake that precise kind of work for the military and security services: as they are already doing
https://techinformed.com/meta-superintelligence-push/
The real ‘boogey-man’ of surveillance and control, Palantir (who’ve just signed a huge contract with the UK government) work on a different model. Rather than building their own capacity, they partner with others to create that data centre capacity for them. Just as the video above outlines, a year ago Palantir partnered with an energy company and Amazon Web Services to deliver the same kind of capacity that Meta is developing:
https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2025/Palantir-Launches-Chain-Reaction-to-Build-American-AI-Infrastructure-Founding-Partners-Include-CenterPoint-Energy-and-NVIDIA/
Also don’t forget that the owners of Meta, Amazon, and Palantir, have all come out to back Donald Trump, and that Donald Trump’s government is now actively targeting ‘liberal’ governments in Europe, including the UK, by backing European Far-Right lobbies:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/05/civilisational-erasure-us-strategy-document-appears-to-echo-far-right-conspiracy-theories-about-europe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srCked8HMNc
Almost eight years ago I gave a presentation on how AI was reshaping the military/security services’ use of data through ‘fusion centres’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWXMIwlG2lA
{that’s a 15 minute summary of a 30 minute session}
It’s quite quaint to look at that again!
We are SO far beyond that point in terms of scale now. As someone who has been using computes for activism for over 40 years, and who has tracked the use of technology by the state over all that time, I think we’ve reached a significant inflexion point:
Meta, Amazon, and Google’s exponentially greater level of compute power has civil liberties implications not simply because of their capacity to process our personal data, but to the extent to which our ‘digital view’ of the world can be tailored towards people’s specific psychological weak points (which is alluded to in the last few minutes of the Hyperion video). It’s one thing to use that to sell clothes.
It’s something wholly different when -- tech. giants use that power to shape society’s world view. updating my old presentation on fusion centres looking at how AI is now being used to push the techno-feudalist agenda. The outcome of that won’t just be about how ‘bad’ things are, but how we can all actively ‘disengage’ from that process in order to limit its hold over us. Sorry if that sounds a bit ‘neoluddite’, but that’s basically the only tool civil society has left now!—since there is zero mainstream political debate about this issue.
This issue is beyond any discussion of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom of speech’, or ‘freedom to protest’. The underlying process here, as I outlined in my 2018 presentation, is the creation of a system of influence and control to constrain society, and preserve/reinforce that economic power within a world that’s already beginning to fall apart under the pressures created by that system. That is the true mission of creating giga-watt-scale data processing centres.
If anyone’s interested, and enough people stump up a few venues to make it worthwhile, I might work-up a session/lecture on this later in the year -
Get in touch if you might be interested in hosting that (note, ‘negotiable’ funding would be required as my work has collapsed over the last couple of years).
Taa,
P.
“It’s compliance staying silent if resistance comes from love”
(Ren, ‘Vincent’s Tale, Starry Night’, 2026)