Meta Is Spending $10b in Rural Louisiana to Build Its Largest Data Center
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The debate rages on as Meta splurges $10 billion on a massive data center in rural Louisiana, sparking concerns over the environmental impact of such a massive energy-hungry project. Commenters are up in arms over Louisiana's new law redefining "green energy" to include natural gas, with some pointing out the significant methane leaks associated with it, which can be 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. While some argue that natural gas is still cleaner than coal, others counter that the distinction gets muddled when considering overall emissions and pollution. As one commenter astutely notes, the real issue is that fossil fuels, whether gas or coal, are ultimately a losing bet for the planet.
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As much as I prefer burning gas over coal, conflating it with zero(-ish) emission energy sources like wind, solar, and nuclear is bad.
So only looking at the byproducts of methane combustion is also misleading since nat. gas plants largely aren't burning methane - and blanket statements for all natural gas are also misleading since e.g. the gas from Canada is extremely 'Sour' and releases a ton of sulfur compounds when burned, often with fewer scrubbers than coal plants.
Methane will eventually break down into CO2, so if you look at the GWP for years 13-100, it’s 1. The weighted average for years 1-100 is over 20x, so it follows that if you look only at a shorter time frame, it would be dramatically higher and is indeed - somewhere north or 80 for a 20-year time frame.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...
As far as sour gas is concerned - not all natural gas formations are created equal. If you look at any serious pollution evaluation, they take into account which formation the gas was harvested from. Texas gas is pretty ‘sweet’ with low sulfur and acid content but much of the oil/gas in Western Canada or the Gulf is ‘sour’ and must be treated and refined prior to being sold as fuel. So it also follows here that flaring methane from sour fields is going to release a bunch of the souring compounds and have a much stronger environmental impact as compared to sweet formations.
https://nsrp.vn/latest-article/sour-crude-oil-and-sweet-crud...
Anyone who has to live in a fairly closed system (i.e. this planet) in which fossil fuels are burned for power would be beyond a fool to not strongly prefer gas over coal seeing as their greenhouse emissions are close enough to be within arguing distance. It's all the other stuff coming out that's the problem with coal.
Summarized: Anyone would be a fool not to prefer gas or coal, because their emissions are nearly equal.
One doesn't follow from the other, can you correct/elaborate?
I was much more concerned that it will be expensive to cool because it's situated in a state with a lot of hot and humid days.
Nuclear for base load and gas for peak/flexible demand is the most climate friendly solution available.
All of them require that; but not all of them require it during the production. Some, like natural gas, do.
Come on Louisiana legislature, at least make them pay for resurfacing a highway or something.
I don't understand. What are the specific risks facing the people of Louisiana?
Also the people working for that company. Unimaginable wealth, both at the corporate and personal level, everyone aware at this point that the climate is breaking down and yet, they just can't do the right thing because they are just too damn greedy.
Given that the human brain takes much longer to "train", I wonder how the energy efficiency pans out — comparing the two.
[Edit] ok, yes, please. I get that i missed the k in kcal. The point stands. Biological training is massively more efficient, even when you forget to multiply by 1000
A human consuming 2000 kcal/day (conservative estimate) uses about 2.32 kWh per day. Over 75 years, that's roughly 64,000 kWh.
If the true, total cost of a machine to perform some task is less than a person to do the same task, then the machine should do it and the person should move to do what the machine cannot. This means more energy is available for everything else, living included.
In general, saying that biological systems are "wildly efficient" is... wildly wrong. Some biological processes are optimized by evolution... most are not. There are no bicycles in nature.
Nearly everything a biological system accomplishes depends on massive external machinery.
Humans are only intellectually interesting because of their use of tools.
Doesn't pass the smell test. I think I could push an electric car at least a mile a day if that's what I spent most my extra calories on. If I did that I'd surpass its range in well under 2 years, much less than my lifetime.
> Electricity demand in the U.S. held steady for 15 years but, last year, it increased by 3%— marking the fifth-highest rise this century. More jumps are projected for years to come.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
Total electricity generated has been relatively flat for a couple decades.
A variety of factors may or may not make a future where aggregate electricity demand would increases, or stagnates, or even declined.
This means it isn't securities fraud when Meta tries to meet "climate commitments" due to the greenwashing of fossil gas generation by the state of Louisiana. Louisiana is a low regulation jurisdiction that doesn't care if most of the state ends up a Superfund site, so it is ideal to colocate data centers that are going to burn up a bunch of fossil gas there over their lifetime (when they are unwelcome elsewhere).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Alley
https://www.propublica.org/article/toxmap-poison-in-the-air
https://www.propublica.org/article/cancer-alley-louisiana-ep...
https://www.propublica.org/article/welcome-to-cancer-alley-w...
"World Bank is urging energy firms to gather the gas and sell it to businesses and consumers.... Companies can use the gas in mobile electricity generating stations, to power their oil drilling sites, or as a fuel in petrochemical plants."
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63051458
https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/gasflaringreduction/ga...
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cvawx7/e...
It’s north of the Old River/Morganza flood control system. I think this would have to fail first in order for the Meta site to be in danger.
Also, if the New Madrid fault went off again, I think you’d kiss this site goodbye. But if that happened you’d have about a million higher priority concerns than a stupid data center.
This area hasn't been underwater in a meaningful way since the 1927 flood of the Mississippi.
Any situation that floods that area is going to be well beyond 100-year floods, likely beyond 1000-year, and (like the 1927 flood) predicated on catastrophic levee failures that result in the Mississippi being over 100 miles wide.
Is it possible? Of course. Is it likely? No. Would there be much bigger issues than a server farm being offline? Yes.
The worst-case scenario from a storm that hits locally (which, e.g., the 1927 flood was absolutely not a consequence of - it was water from upstream, which climate change will weaken because of decreased snowmelt) is like Harvey over Houston (similar terrain). But this is much farther inland and could not replenish itself from the Gulf.
That said, it is in the middle of nowhere.
I get where you're coming from but still I find funny in so many levels that the literal speed limit of the universe is too slow for our mundane (or even banal in FB case) needs. the universe isn't good enough to our need to move bullshit across the globe. surreal.
In the same vein it would be awesome if this _need for speed_ would materialize in infinite funding of neutrino based communication research.
Hurricanes on the other hand will still be a very real thing.
That's because you've chosen not to read about it. Location is one of the most important things they think about for data centers and there are plenty of articles on the subject.
Here's a recent article:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/25/meta-massive-data-center-lou...
“We set out looking for a place where we could expand into gigawatts pretty quickly, and really get moving within that community on a large plot of land very quickly,” said Rachel Peterson, vice president of data centers for Meta. “We looked at finding very, very large contiguous plots of land that had access to the infrastructure that we need, the energy that we needed, and could move very, very quickly for us.”
To answer the question you're implying, surrounding temperature is pretty minor, the cooling required is orders of magnitude higher, so power access is more important; You'll frequently find them located near sources of energy.
Similar reason to why a lot of chemical manufacturing is in Louisiana.
I do often wonder if it might be worthwhile to shove a bunch of server farms into a few abandoned mines, if you setup the appropriate infrastructure in said mines to protect your data centers.
You'd get Waco'ed or Ruby Ridge'ed.
You bet Meta asked for incentives, but sometimes a guarantee of future power capacity, fast permitting, or ideal locations are worth more than the incentives the state could afford.
You just need to make them think you might not build somewhere else unless they sweeten the deal.
Hopefully this just means that governments have wisened up to the fact that a gazillion DCs are going to be built so if you pass on Meta you can just pickup Google's.
https://www.opportunitylouisiana.gov/news/meta-selects-north...
It is bounded by Fortenberry Rd on the N, LA183 on the E, US80 on the S and Jaggers Ln on the W. It overlays Burn, Wade and Smalling roads.
https://www.richlandparishdatacenter.com/blank-5
It has 6 reviews and a 3.7 rating on Google. https://maps.app.goo.gl/pxXR5zxfiiBDDNrB7
construction website: https://www.richlandparishdatacenter.com/
It's a pretty piss poor location to invest a boat load of money without putting servers in actual boats.
You can find it in your favorite podcast player. Everybody should listen to it.
Obviously, to summarise I have to remove the supporting examples, and the dozens of different people being interviewed. To be clear, the journalists aren't personally making all the criticisms, just interviewing other people, so if some of the following seems to contradict itself, that's why.
A fair chunk of the podcast involves explaining the context to a broad audience. You know, explaining what a data centre is, outlining the cloud market and its major players, etc.
The criticisms outlined in the podcast include:
* Data centres produce very few jobs for the communities they're located in.
* They are often built in struggling communities where 'enterprise zones' offer big tax breaks, hoping to attract employers.
* They consume quite a lot of power - not as much as, say, an aluminium smelter, but perhaps as much as 150,000 homes. Few cities have that much spare grid capacity, and some have warned about risks of rolling blackouts.
* 20 percent of Ireland's electricity is used for data centres (they're something of europe's data centre capital due to their attractive tax rates)
* Energy demand at data centres leads to greater emissions at power plants. Even if the data centre contracts to only buy renewable power, that might displace less-eco-friendly buyers of renewables onto non-renewable power sources. And a lot of things like 'carbon credits' are based on rather creative accounting.
* One high-profile data centre (in The Dalles, Oregon) is in a town suffering a drought, and consumes quite a lot of water, considering it's a drought area. Grass on the local golf course is completely dead.
* Land and tax breaks are often acquired through secretive shell companies that insist on secrecy agreements with desperate local governments; in one case the government didn't even know they were dealing with Google. This secrecy extends to agreements about things like water usage.
* As you can imagine, a local community suffering a drought sees the local data centre's water consumption being kept secret by elected officials, they assume the worst.
* Some data centre builders, like Elon Musk, have a history of making legally non-binding promises, then not bothering to keep them. And of running large gas generators without permits.
* The kind of distressed post-industrial communities that welcome data centres often have high levels of pollution and cancer, making those unpermitted generators particularly bad.
* Many of the hyperscalers are also big AI boosters, so it's not like the datacentre operators can disclaim responsibility for the power needs of AI.
* Many people have criticisms of AI, beyond energy consumption. Such as huge centralised LLMs transferring more control to huge tech firms; getting things wrong; AI friends being an alienating concept; having heavy-handed censorship; widespread use of bots on platforms like twitter and reddit; risks of job losses; being trained on pirated ebooks without authors' permission; being a really shitty therapist; producing mediocre art; producing porn depicting real people without their consent; producing creepy underage porn.
* Or AI might be a bubble that's about to burst, which would also be bad but for other reasons.
* Tech business leaders like Sam Altman are on record saying some pretty wacky things about AI power consumption, like that the high power demands of AI will force us to invent fusion power. A load of them also have weird, messianic ideas about "the singularity", or think we're all in a simulation already, or think living in a Matrix-style simulated 'metaverse' sounds like a great thing.
* Many of the highest-profile tech folks - the billionaires - have very right-wing politics. Such as opposing all regulation as a matter of principle, except on the occasions when it works for their benefit. Some people think expecting these folks to regulate themselves isn't the best idea.
Overall this is all stuff that followers of tech industry news will probably have heard before; the podcast just adds context, draws it together, and finds sources in the form of interviewees.
Uplifting everyone ensures that we'll be that much more likely to find the next Mozart or Tesla or Torvalds or whoever, if we give them a chance.
But yes, better to acknowledge how capital can be better utilized. You can probably give away free school lunches for an entire generation of children with that $10 billion in Louisiana, or you can give it to Zuckerberg to get slightly richer.
Becomes abundantly clear which one is better for societal advancement.
The annual cost of the National School Lunch Program is $18B, so, no.
Definitely a waste of capital and a mismanagement of funds if we continue to allow companies like Meta to make these types of projects when you yourself say that these projects are definitely within reach of feasibility and costs.
From another perspective, compared to a coal mine or a paint factory or a steelworks or an airport or a landfill or an oil refinery, data centres are safe, low-pollution, low-noise, low-odour, and low-traffic. By the standards of industrial areas, they're great neighbours.
• Data centers consume lots of water. The example they start with is that Google's data center in Dalles, Oregon used 355 million gallons of water in 2021, which was 29% of all water consumed in the city (its population is 15K though, but they neglect to mention that).
• By 2023, hyperscale data centers used 66 billion liters of water in the U.S.—triple their volume from less than a decade earlier.
• They quote estimates that ChattGPT consumes 500 mL of water for every 10-50 user prompts (or 10-50 mL per prompt).
• in Ireland datacenters in total draw "over 20% of national electricity", which outstrips the total energy usage of all urban homes in the country.
• In Cerrillos, Chile local residents blocked Google's plans to build a datacenter there after discovering the scale of water use the centers would require (169 liters per second iand its a drought-stricken area).
• Power consumption of data centers is enormous and puts a very high load on energy grids across the world.
My impression is that this is clear example of politically-biased podcast with alarmist and accusatory tone, where none of the facts presented are particularly damning in the grand scheme of things.
In data centers with large water consumption, the water mostly (90%) goes to evaporative cooling (they let hot water turn into vapor carrying away the heat) with the rest going to 10% humidification systems (getting to 40-60% humidity inside to prefect static electricity buildup).
Let's take a moment to recognize what a dream "ecological cost" it is - turning water into vapour - compared to the old timey industries and real environmental problems people have had to deal with. Old timers in Cleveland can tell you how until 1970s (before first serious ecological enforcement), Cuyahoga river running through the city would once in a while BURN WITH FIRE Bible-style from all kinds of unprocessed oil-based waste being dumped by plants and factories on its course. It's the unfortunate reality that many of our vital industrial processes that make our civilization possible rely on dissolving all kinds of most dangereous and toxic compounds in water.
Also, the cost of evaporation cooling is not something fundamental to data centers and is not something that cannot be altered with some known engineering solutions and manageble cost overheads if there is a need. For example, in Belgium they built a two-loop water cooling system that can use industry waste or even sea water. You can also get a fully closed-circuit zero running water cooling system (fridge-style) if you absolutely must.
As for high power consumption and "climate change impact", none of this is specific to data centers. We might like it or not but our society runs on energy and electric power. This whole mindset showcased in this podcast that all energy consumption is something bad and its all about reducing it is so 2010s. I think, its obvious by now that this the road to pure economical if not civilizational suicide. A society that does not prioritize building for plentiful, cheap and hopefully clean energy is doomed to wither and stagnate.
Datacenters are not appreciably different than other industrial operations in the scale of their water usage and I'm more curious about how this meme spread than about how evaporative cooling works.
And burning fossil fuels is pretty shady considering how cheap solar has gotten.
While they are at it, I am pretty sure they will enable a couple of extra genocides like they did in Myanmar with the extra capacities from that data center.
Vampires might be a loaded term, but it might also apply as a conclusion of an unbiased study.
* Data centers consume a lot of water. The example they start with is Google's data center in Dalles, Oregon, which used 355 million gallons of water in 2021. This amounted to 29% of all water consumed in the city (they did not bother to mention that the city's population is only 15K though).
* In 2023, hyperscale data centers used 66 billion liters of water in the U.S.: 3x the volume from ten years ago!
* They quote estimates that ChatGPT consumes 500 mL of water for every 10-50 user prompts (or 10-50 mL per prompt, which again sounds less dramatic).
* In Ireland, data centers collectively draw "over 20% of national electricity," which outstrips the total energy usage of all urban homes in the country.
* In Cerrillos, Chile, local residents blocked Google's plans to build a data center after discovering the scale of water use it would require (169 liters per second and its a drought-stricken area or something).
* The power consumption of data centers is enormous and places a very high load on energy grids worldwide. No specific numbers mentioned though.
My impression is that this is a clear example of a politically-biased podcast with an alarmist and accusatory tone, where none of the facts presented are particularly damning in the grand scheme of things.
In data centers with large water consumption, most of the water (90%) is used for evaporative cooling (letting hot water turn into vapor to carry away the heat), with the remaining 10% going to humidification systems (maintaining 40-60% humidity inside to prevent static electricity buildup, basically evaporation as well).
Let's take a moment to recognize what a dream "ecological cost" evaporating water is compared to old-time industries and the real environmental problems people have had to deal with. Old-timers in Cleveland can tell you how, until the 1970s (before the first serious ecological protection enforcement), the Cuyahoga River running through the city would CATCH FIRE and BURN Bible-style because of all the unprocessed, oil-based waste being dumped by plants and factories along its course. It is an unfortunate reality that many key industrial processes of our civilization dissolve dangerous and toxic compounds with water.
Also, the cost of evaporation cooling is not fundamental to data centers. You can change things around with some known engineering solutions and the costs for it would not be a deal breaker. For example, in Belgium, they built a two-loop water cooling system that can use industrial waste water (or even seawater in principle).
If you absolutely must, you can also build a fully closed-circuit liquid cooling system (think big fridge). The thing is that some water drawn from municipal system in a little city in the middle of nowhere isn't a problem.
As for high power consumption and "climate change impact," none of this is specific to data centers.
(And, this whole mindset about climate change in this podcast is just so 2010s. No, energy consumption is not inherently bad and sinful. No, the math of solving climate change with consuming less, putting on a sweater and saving does not work. A society that does not prioritize building for plentiful, cheap, (and yes,clean) energy is doomed to stagnate and wither economically. I see even most leftist people change their mind about this over the last few years, tired of never-ending green washing. If only political orthodoxies were able to change with the times...).
I see quite a few golf course near The Dalles, Oregon. (“The” is actually part of the town name).
For comparison, one acre-foot of water is 325,850 gallons. Google’s data center used around 1090 acre-feet in 2021. One acre of alfalfa requires 4-6 acre-feet of water per harvest, so another way to look at it is Google’s data center used as much water as 218 acres of alfalfa. There are a million acres of alfalfa growing in California.
https://alfalfa.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk12586/files/...
The #1 thing that makes MISO so cheap is the fact that it has the heaviest coal generation mix (>40%) out of all US regional grid operators. Any talk about natural gas or renewables pales in comparison.
It looks like natural gas is usually the biggest source of electricity.
[0] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-MIDW-MISO/72h/hourly...
I'd be curious to test the GP's point. Since electricity maps doesn't have cost data for most US balancing authorities, you maybe could try figuring out power costs per balancing authority to end customers by using something like the https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia861/ "Sales to Customers Customer Sited" data. Revenue over Megawatthours for Industrial service.
https://miso.singularity.energy/realtime
I am seeing 39.1% right now
Meta built a data center in North Kansas City. I'm not sure details of their break (Mayor loves to hand out money), but power is likely cheaper, & def much greener (1/3 from wind farms in Western Kansas state last I checked).
"take advantage of a new Louisiana incentive program, established by Act 730, that offers qualifying projects a state and local sales and use tax rebate on the purchase or lease of data center equipment"
https://www.opportunitylouisiana.gov/news/meta-selects-north...
Curious as to how you reached this conclusion. No taxpayer funds are going towards construction or operation of the data center. The lack of tax revenue from Meta is nothing spent, and they're still going to be paying into the local economy. The energy infrastructure is going to be built by Entergy, who've projected it to cost customers ~$1 more or less per month.
As someone who lives here, this is one of the few times I agree with our government. We're one of the least competitive states in the country, our tech sector is almost non-existent. It's reasonable to offer what you can to attract business. I think Landry's LED efforts so far have been a respectable attempt at improving the state of things.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...
Can't wait for their stock to crash and Zuck to be out.
Have there been any formal studies looking at OpEx ROI for offgrid carbon free generation + storage for data centers? Exiting the grid and vertically integrating on site generation eliminates a lot of risk when dealing with an external utility.
FAANG has the market cap to drive down costs for reliable carbon-free generation and storage, like Alphabet is doing[1].
Microsoft is demonstrating water-free cooling solutions[2]. As long as there's a fiber backbone nearby, FAANG can slash energy OpEx and not worry about the rest of the grid. Or natural gas prices.
[1]https://dataconomy.com/2024/12/11/why-googles-800m-bet-on-cl...
[2]https://datacentremagazine.com/news/how-are-companies-pionee...
I guarantee you that a lot of that $10B will be spent out of state. This is yet another corporate handout with the thin veil of "technology investment" Louisiana loves.
Myth: It has computers, therefore we are investing in technology and hi-tech jobs.
Fact: This will be built by out of state contractors, staffed by mostly out of state workers, and far less than anyone expects or claims. And will essentially transfer local resources out of the state while making those resources more scarce for residents.
Louisiana let EA run their QA from here to severely underpay people and pay fewer taxes. They courted IBM to do the same with Salesforce jobs. And now Meta gets to exploit the state to enrich another out-of-state corporation.
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