Meta's Louisiana data center hits $50B

PLUS: China now has a reuseable rocket

Jennifer Mossalgue

July 14, 2026

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Meta just supersized its Louisiana data center into a $50B, 5-gigawatt colossus — and the construction boom is already cutting local teachers’ bonus checks bigger than their annual salaries.

Richland Parish, with a population of 20K, is suddenly home to one of the largest AI infrastructure investments on Earth. The catch: the money and the megaproject run on very different clocks.

In today’s tech rundown:

Meta’s Louisiana data center hits $50B
China lands its first reusable rocket — in a net
EU moves to get kids off social media
This wearable paints onto your skin
Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

🤑 Meta's Louisiana data center hits $50B

Image source: Meta / Images 2.0

The Rundown: Meta is supersizing its Louisiana AI megaproject into a 5-gigawatt, $50B-plus data center — while the construction boom is already delivering some local teachers massive bonus checks.

The details:

Hyperion, Meta’s data center in Richland Parish, is expanding from a planned 2 gigawatts to 5, pushing its projected cost from $27B to more than $50B.
Meta says LA businesses have already landed over $1.6B in contracts, with $1B-plus earmarked for roads, water systems, and other local infrastructure.
The construction boom helped Richland Parish award eligible certified teachers bonuses as high as $50,935, while support staff got up to $17,472.
The bonuses aren’t a Meta donation: they come from a local sales tax supercharged by the buildout, a windfall expected to last through construction.

Why it matters: The bonuses are real, but they’re funded by the temporary part of the deal: sales taxes on a construction boom that ends by the early 2030s. The permanent part — property taxes on a $50B facility — is what Meta negotiated down, so the parish’s biggest year may already be behind it before Hyperion even switches on.

SPACE TECH

🚀 China lands its first reusable rocket — in a net

Image source: CASC

The Rundown: China just became the second country to recover an orbital-class rocket booster — and it skipped the SpaceX playbook entirely, catching the booster in a net at sea.

The details:

The 63m Long March 10B launched from Hainan, placing a satellite into orbit before its first stage returned to the recovery ship six minutes after separation.
Instead of carrying heavy landing legs, the booster deployed four hooks near its grid fins, which snagged steel cables stretched across a moveable net.
China plans to relaunch the recovered booster before year-end, while using the vehicle to test technology for its commercial and crewed-lunar ambitions.
Its day job is satellite launches, but the Long March 10B shares its first stage with the rocket that will carry China’s new crew capsule.

Why it matters: Moving the landing hardware onto a ship could leave the rocket lighter, simpler, and able to carry more cargo — a clever alternative to copying Falcon 9 bolt for bolt. But SpaceX’s real advantage is hundreds of landings and routine reflights; China has caught one booster, and now it has to prove it can do it again.

SOCIAL MEDIA

🛑 EU moves to get kids off social media

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: The EU is preparing to turn its child-safety concerns into access rules — panel co-chairs told Brussels on Monday that under-13s should face EU-wide restrictions on social media until tech companies prove they are safe.

The details:

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sketched her own tiers: no screens before 3, supervised access under 13, gradual access for teens.
Instagram, TikTok, and most major platforms prohibit under-13 signups — the report is effectively saying self-enforcement failed.
A legal proposal lands within weeks, but member states are split on age: Spain wants 16, France 15, while Estonia and Belgium call age bans unenforceable.
On Friday, Brussels preliminarily found Facebook and Instagram’s addictive design in breach of EU law, warning Meta to change features.

Why it matters: Australia, the UK, Turkey, and Indonesia have already banned younger teens from platforms — but the EU would be the largest market to codify the idea that social media is unsafe for kids until proven otherwise. The proposal itself is now a given; the fight is over the cutoff age and how far the restrictions reach.

WEARABLES

🎨 This wearable paints onto your skin

Image source: Wanqing Zhang

The Rundown: Researchers at Penn State, MIT, and China’s Suzhou Institute developed a wearable you paint straight onto your skin — a conductive polymer that breathes like skin and tracks your heart, muscles, and brain waves.

The details:

The material tracked muscle activity, heart rate, and brain waves, including EKG readings that held 95.1% consistency before and after sweating.
At body temperature, the paint let through over 10x more water vapor than Tegaderm, the standard medical-grade film.
The ink combines a conductive polymer with a common soft plastic, and Penn State has already filed a provisional patent on the formula.
The team’s favorite use: cartoon electrodes that make monitoring kid-friendly, with “tattoos,” human-machine interfaces, and plant biometrics further out.

Why it matters: The weak point of every wearable is where it meets the skin, and paint solves that more elegantly than a strap or adhesive does. But the safety report so far is light — one 24-hour skin test, preliminary toxicity screens, unresolved MRI questions — so the Pikachu tattoos are on hold for now.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

X updated its algorithm to show users more posts from mutuals — people they follow who follow them back.

Europe is testing solid-state air conditioners that cool with stretched metals, semiconductors, magnets, and compressed crystals, ditching refrigerants.

Firefox is joining Chrome and Edge on the browser-update treadmill, shifting to twice-monthly releases as Mozilla races to ship features and security fixes faster.

Netflix is reportedly exploring 24/7 “always-on” live TV channels and possible bundles with services like Peacock as it scrambles to counter slowing engagement.

A Bronx hospital laid off 12 nurses after rolling out AI-powered software, an early test of what happens when healthcare automation starts cutting into clinical jobs.

Disney+ is reportedly weighing making part of its streaming library free to watch, a move that would help it compete with YouTube and Tubi as free ad-supported services.

Ireland’s data centers reportedly swallowed 23% of the country’s electricity in 2025, nearly matching every home combined, despite years of grid restrictions.

Intel is pouring around $5.7B into its Irish chip plant to ramp production of AI-era server processors, after dropping planned factories in Germany and Poland.

Tech billionaires including Peter Thiel, Steve Chen, Bill Gates, and Evan Spiegel are strictly limiting their own kids’ screen time — Thiel to just 90 minutes a week.

A coalition of 12 states led by California filed a federal lawsuit Monday to block Paramount Skydance’s $110B takeover of Warner Bros.

Waze is adding AI features including a Motorcycle mode, a “Less Chatty” voice option, and deeper Gemini integration for voice searches and reports.

COMMUNITY