Project dossier · New Albany, Ohio

Meta Prometheus Operating

Part of Prometheus. Chip types: B200. Epoch AI estimates ~562 MW.

Key facts

Operator: Meta
Owner: Meta
Size: 562 MW
Location: New Albany, Ohio
Stage today: Operating

Source
read 2026-08-14

What to do next

Next step: Already operating — the leverage now is enforcement: noise and water conditions, tax revenue tracking, and any expansion filing, which reopens the record.

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What has happened so far (16 events)

2022-04-21announcement
Meta announced a further expansion of its New Albany data center campus, adding buildings that brought total investment in Ohio to more than $1.5 billion and supporting 300 operational jobs and 1,200 peak construction workers. · source
2025-03-27filing
Power Engineering reported that Will-Power (Williams Companies) had filed with the Ohio Power Siting Board for two behind-the-meter natural gas plants, Socrates North and Socrates South, each 200 MW, at Meta's New Albany International Business Park campus, with a planned in-service date of Q3 2026. · source
2025-06-09approval
The Ohio Power Siting Board approved the Socrates South Power Generation Project, a 200 MW behind-the-meter natural gas plant in Licking County to be built by Will-Power OH (a Williams Companies subsidiary) to serve exclusively Sidecat, part of Meta Platforms, on its 740-acre New Albany Business Park campus. · source
2025-06-11construction
Power Engineering reported that construction on the Socrates South 200 MW natural gas plant serving Sidecat (Meta) in New Albany was planned to begin in June 2025 with expected completion in November 2026, detailing the turbine fleet including Solar Turbines Titan 250s, Siemens SGT400s, and Caterpillar reciprocating engines. · source
2025-07-14announcement
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Threads and Facebook that Meta's first AI supercluster, Prometheus, a 1-gigawatt data center in New Albany, Ohio, will come online in 2026, alongside a larger Hyperion cluster and hundreds of billions of dollars in compute investment. · source
2025-09-29operational
A Meta engineering blog post described Prometheus as a 1-gigawatt cluster spanning multiple traditional data center buildings plus weatherproof tents and adjacent colocation facilities, and said the buildout was currently underway. · source
2025-11-01coverage
In early November 2025, Turner Construction evacuated over 1,000 workers from the Prometheus data center construction site in New Albany after a terminated contractor returned and threatened a supervisor with a firearm; security confiscated the weapon and law enforcement responded. · source
2025-11-17coverage
Spectrum News 1 reported on Meta's Prometheus in New Albany as potentially the world's first gigawatt-scale data center, noting on-site gas-fired power plants; Mayor Sloan Spalding said the facility would not draw energy off the grid, and residents raised concerns about local power reliability. · source
2026-01-09financing
Meta announced nuclear energy agreements with Oklo, Vistra and TerraPower for up to 6.6 GW by 2035, stating the projects will deliver power to grids supporting its operations including the Prometheus supercluster in New Albany, Ohio. · source
2026-01-19report
WOSU reported that a University of Virginia/Joyce Foundation study found Columbus will become the second-largest data center hub in the Great Lakes region behind Chicago, noting Meta is wrapping up construction on its Prometheus gigawatt-scale data center in New Albany and that Ohio data centers currently consume 5.3% of the state's energy, projected to reach 10.9% within four years. · source
2026-01-27financing
Corning and Meta announced a multiyear agreement worth up to $6 billion for Corning to supply optical fiber, cable, and connectivity solutions for Meta's U.S. data center buildout, with Corning expanding its Hickory, North Carolina, manufacturing facility where Meta will be the anchor customer. · source
2026-03-05coverage
The American Prospect reported that Meta opened its first Ohio data center in 2017 under the operating name Sidecat LLC after state lawmakers approved $37 million in tax breaks, and that Meta plans to open its one-gigawatt Prometheus AI cluster housed in five or more buildings in 2026. · source
2026-03-16construction
Energies Media reported that Williams expects to bring each of its Socrates power generation facilities in New Albany online around the end of 2026, with construction anticipated to begin during 2025 and a one-year commissioning period following construction start. · source
2026-05-27incentive
Governor DeWine ordered the Ohio Tax Credit Authority to pause consideration of new data center sales tax exemption requests after the state underestimated the 2025 cost of the exemption by more than $1.4 billion, directing the pause to take effect after the Authority's June 1 meeting while a Joint Data Center Committee studies the issue. · source
2026-06-26approval
The Ohio Power Siting Board authorized construction of the Socrates the Younger (STY) Power Generation Facility, a 250 MW natural gas plant with 116 MW battery storage on 109 acres in Licking County, New Albany, to serve Sidecat LLC (Meta) behind-the-meter, subject to 36 conditions. · source
2026-08-10announcement
Mark Zuckerberg announced the $1 billion Future Is for Everyone Fund to invest in communities where Meta owns or is building data centers, including New Albany, targeting locally identified priorities such as schools, teachers, first responders, and energy and water infrastructure. · source

Find the paper trail

Find the paper trail (0 filed · 11 places to look)

State environmental permits

Backup generators, water withdrawal and stormwater are permitted by the state, usually earlier and in more detail than anything filed locally.

Ohio EPA — Division of Air Pollution ControlThe program page: which permits this state requires, and the office that issues them.
Ohio EPA eBusiness Center (Air Services)Searchable public filings — search the operator, the shell LLC on the deed, and the address.

County & town filings

The rezoning application, site plan, traffic and noise studies, staff report and every revision.

Search New Albany planning filingssearchPlanning departments post application files under many different names. Find the department, then ask the clerk for the application number — that number unlocks everything else.
Search New Albany property records / GISsearchThe parcel record names the buying LLC and the sale date, which is what ties an anonymous filing to an operator.

Utility & grid records

The electricity request is filed with the grid operator and the utility long before the town hears about it — and states the real load.

PJM Interconnection (Mid-Atlantic, Ohio Valley) — interconnection queueRequested megawatts, queue position and target in-service date. The MW here is the real number; the one at the town meeting is often phase one.
Public Utilities Commission of Ohio — docket searchSpecial contracts, large-load tariffs and rate cases are docketed here. Testimony and exhibits are public, and are usually more candid than the press release.
FERC eLibraryFederal filings: transmission agreements, interconnection service agreements, and co-location disputes.
Search the serving utility for a will-serve lettersearchThe will-serve or load-service letter is the utility's own written commitment. Ask the utility and the PUC for it by name — it is frequently the first document to exist.

Federal databases

Works anywhere, and covers the operator's record at its other sites.

EPA ECHO facility searchEvery federally-reported air, water and waste permit at a facility, plus its inspection and violation history. Search by address or draw a radius around the site. This project's locality centres on 40.080, -82.790 — search that point with a 5-mile radius.
EPA EnvirofactsThe same underlying records, queryable by county — useful for 'what else is permitted near this site' rather than one facility.
EPA Facility Registry ServiceResolves the shell LLC on a permit to the facility it belongs to. Worth a look when the filing name means nothing locally.

These are places to look, not evidence that anything has been filed. Links were checked on 2026-08-21; search links are queries, not records. What to ask for.

Around here

Ohio briefing — rates, grid carbon, PUC contacts.

Other tracked projects in Ohio

Google New Albany — New Albany, 0 mi Operating
Aligned Data Centers - Pataskala industrial park — Pataskala (Licking County), 9 mi Awaiting decision
Google Columbus — Columbus, 16 mi Operating
Google Lancaster — Lancaster, 27 mi Operating
Urbana Technology Hub — Urbana (Champaign County), 51 mi In review

Cite this page: GridWatch AI, “Meta Prometheus”, aigridwatch.com/projects/meta-prometheus, retrieved 2026-10-11.

As of August 2026 (2m ago) · changes weekly — re-check before citing

A working set of identified proposals a community can track, not a census — most of the country's activity is not in here yet. Pennsylvania is the exception: its rows are synced from PA DEP's own data-center permit tracker, so the state's coverage is close to complete and carries the permit trail with it. **Each row carries its own provenance.** Rows showing a verification date link to reporting or the governing body's own record and were read on that date; rows marked *unverified* have no source on record — a lead to check, not a fact to cite. **Stage is derived, not asserted.** *Hearing scheduled*, *Awaiting decision*, *Approved* and *Withdrawn* are computed from each row's milestone dates on every rebuild, so a hearing date that has passed stops reading 'scheduled'. Hearings get moved and projects re-file under new names — treat a scheduled date as the earliest to act by, and confirm with the clerk before relying on it. Leads are mined into data/project_candidates.json and promoted here only after a human reads a primary source.

Part of the data center project tracker — open data, CC BY 4.0 (JSON · CSV).