Meta breaks ground on $10B, 1GW data center in Lebanon, Indiana

Meta broke ground on a new data center campus in Lebanon, Indiana on 2026-02-11 — a 1GW, $10 billion-plus build that Meta calls "one of our largest infrastructure investments to date." It is Meta's second Indiana data center after Jeffersonville (2024) and sits inside the state-backed LEAP Research and Innovation District in Boone County, ~30 miles northwest of Indianapolis, where Eli Lilly is already anchoring a separate pharmaceutical-manufacturing campus of comparable scale. The Lebanon site is 1,500 acres, 13 buildings, four million square feet at full build; the first phase is targeted for late 2027 or early 2028.

The workforce numbers are the part that reads load-bearing for the Indianapolis metro. Construction is expected to support more than 4,000 jobs at peak; the operational campus will run on approximately 300 staff once online. The construction wave is short-term but materially large for Boone County's labor market, and the 300 long-term roles add a new kind of employer to a metro whose tech roster has historically been Salesforce, Lilly, and a long tail of enterprise IT shops. Meta also committed more than $120 million to local public infrastructure — water, roads, transmission, utilities — plus a 20-year, $20 million Boone REMC energy-assistance program, a workforce-development partnership with three local school districts, an Arable-funded farmer irrigation program in the Upper Wabash River Basin, and a 100% match of the campus's new energy use with clean energy procurement. The LEED Gold target and closed-loop water cooling read as the standard hyperscale playbook for 2026.

Read alongside the El Paso AI-optimized data center Meta broke ground on four months earlier (2025-10-15) and the Mythos-class model cohort coming from Anthropic and others over the coming quarters, the Lebanon announcement is the Midwestern half of a geographically distributed hyperscale buildout — the Texas site takes the desert / cheap-power lane, Indiana takes the LEAP-adjacent industrial-policy lane. For the Indianapolis metro specifically: the LEAP District has now signaled itself as Indiana's anchor AI / biotech buildout corridor, and Lebanon joins Jeffersonville on the short list of US towns whose labor markets and water infrastructure are now load-bearing for Meta's AI roadmap.