How Big is Big?

META is building a massive (AI)-focused data centre in northeast Louisiana. The site footprint is 2,250 acres of land - making the Hyperion Data Center one of the largest data-center construction sites ever attempted in the United States. It is a nearly five-mile-long, one-mile-wide tract of land that is being developed to power Meta’s AI ambitions.

It is hard to understand the true scale of a megaproject like this when all you’re looking at is a rectangle in the middle of nowhere. To make that scale legible, Sherwood News has built an interactive map that lets you move Hyperion anywhere in the United States.

Sherwood’s map - See for yourself just how massive Meta’s Hyperion data center is - solves a classic cartographic problem: how do you convey scale when there’s nothing nearby for comparison?

The solution is simple and effective - compare it to somewhere familiar. The map takes a satellite outline of the Hyperion site and allows you to:

• Drop it onto Manhattan
• Overlay it on Washington, DC
• Or enter your own address and see what it would look like next door

By “teleporting” the Hyperion footprint into dense, familiar cities, the map instantly turns abstraction into intuition. In Manhattan, the data center sprawls across neighborhoods. In DC, it dwarfs the National Mall. In residential areas, it feels almost absurdly large.