Meta is spending $10B in rural Louisiana to build its largest data center
84 comments
·August 26, 2025hnburnsy
I am amazed that it appears that Meta did not ask for tax breaks for a $10B project. Seems like they absolutely could have 'bid' this out among competing locales.
codemac
There is a big matrix of risk/reward for any DC location.
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.
jimt1234
I'm not super-familiar with Louisiana, but my general impression is there's a lot of climate/weather events that are gonna impact power reliability. Hmmm.
dardeaup
If you're thinking of hurricanes (and you may not be), the location is far enough away from the coast that they wouldn't be a significant problem.
dylan604
If you've not paid attention to the recent hurricane damages to the US, it wasn't just coastal cities that were hammered. Lots of places "far enough away from the coast" say lots of flooding. A hurricane doesn't just evaporate. The hurricane reverses the process back to Tropical Storm, Depression, etc while continuing to bring lots of rain minus all that wind
hnuser123456
Looks like it's surrounded by ponds to contain potential flooding. And it's apparently getting 3 new power plants.
toomuchtodo
> While Meta has a non-binding promise to build more renewable energy, the Louisiana Legislature passed a new law that adds natural gas to the definition of green energy, allowing Zuckerberg and others to count Entergy’s gas turbines as “green.”
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.
gosub100
Most DCs have SLAs with energy companies and have redundant sources from independent plants, not to mention generators and batteries.
mritterhoff
While Meta has a non-binding promise to build more renewable energy, the Louisiana Legislature passed a new law that adds natural gas to the definition of green energy, allowing Zuckerberg and others to count Entergy’s gas turbines as “green.”
As much as I prefer burning gas over coal, conflating it with zero(-ish) emission energy sources like wind, solar, and nuclear is bad.
juujian
Due to all the methane leaks, gas isn't even as much cleaner than coal as it was purported to be... But hey monitoring programs got cut so I guess that solves the problem...
potato3732842
From a purely greenhouse gas accounting, sure.
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.
PaulStatezny
I think you might have a typo. Reading your comment literally, it doesn't make sense.
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?
mritterhoff
I agree methane leaks (and monitoring programs cuts) are a problem. But even with them, methane burns much more cleanly than coal. The former primarily emits CO2 and H2O, while the latter emits SO2, NOx, heavy metals and more.
mikeyouse
These definitions always get muddled when flipping between CO2 emissions or pollution... coal is definitely worse from a pollution standpoint, is likely worse from a carbon standpoint, but much of the methane produced from natural gas production is just released into the atmosphere and has a dramatically higher warming effect compared to CO2 -- on the order of 80x more warming potential over 20 years and at least 20x over 100 years.
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.
chaos_emergent
I think the problem is that methane is 20x more powerful a GHG than CO2
null
chris_va
As an aside, methane leaks from coal mines can be worse than upstream leaks from O&G.
null
m101
None of those energy source is zero-ish. They all require upfront releases of CO2 to create, and end of life release to recycle.
Nuclear for base load and gas for peak/flexible demand is the most climate friendly solution available.
digdugdirk
Look, I love to be pedantic as much as the next person on this site, but let's not miss the forest for the trees. State level legislature relabeling fossil fuels so they count as "green" is not the path to a better future.
h1fra
burning fossil fuel and depleting the local water aquifer, I'm starting to miss the greenwashing era
jandrese
Is there really a concern that the datacenter is going to drink up all the water in Louisiana?
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.
estearum
Behaving a certain way to pretend being virtuous, it turns out, is almost as good as actually being virtuous.
gosub100
Redefining words to fit their narrative and premise...hmm where have I seen that before?
barbazoo
> Meta has a non-binding promise to build more renewable energy
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.
digdugdirk
Looks like Louisiana is all aboard the "internal colonialism" that seems to be all the rage at the state level lately. In this case, flouting national/international renewable energy policy so the good people of Louisiana can get the long term benefit of... Having to deal with the fallout of another datacentre project?
Come on Louisiana legislature, at least make them pay for resurfacing a highway or something.
lupusreal
> Having to deal with the fallout of another datacentre project?
I don't understand. What are the specific risks facing the people of Louisiana?
matthewdgreen
Who is this non-binding promise being made to, and why make one?
JKCalhoun
"I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today…" Seems to be pretty common these days when corporate make deals with cities/counties/states.
dr-detroit
[dead]
maxehmookau
Adding natural gas to the definition of green energy is absolutely wild. How on earth did that pass?
dublinben
Louisiana has a long history of political corruption, and the petrochemical industry is a major part of their economy.
jgalt212
LA has the resource curse.
jjice
I have to imagine it's just a complete lack of care and classifying it as "green" helps push through something that they're being lobbied to push. I can't imagine this is anything but nonsense.
yoyohello13
We all know how it passed. Legislators have lots of money in natural gas I’m sure.
null
lxm
Interesting that they bring up water consumption https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
codelikeawolf
I'll never understand why tech companies choose some of the locations for their data centers. Considering a big thing with data centers is "keeping stuff cool", you would think they would build them in the northern states, closer to Canada versus the hot sticky swamp.
personjerry
> I'll never understand why tech companies choose some of the locations
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.
moffkalast
Meta has defacto infinite money, they don't have to look for places where operation is cheap, but where they can be above the law as much as possible for doing whatever they want.
phyrex
I'm pretty sure Meta's team has written about that at length. It's about many things, such as (power/transportation/internet/energy) infrastructure, political situation, available workforce, vicinity to population centers, property prices, and a whole lot more
smelendez
Cheap gas, cheap land (it's on a big essentially empty plot that people have wanted to develop for a while, in a poor area with plenty of underutilized farmland), state and local governments that care more about this project than about environmental concerns.
Similar reason to why a lot of chemical manufacturing is in Louisiana.
dj_gitmo
It says right in the article that they have lots of natural gas, and the state is bringing on 2GW of new electrical capacity.
khuey
Cheap land and cheap energy.
gen3
The speed of light is incredibly slow and data through a wire is even slower. Proximity is worth something
aeve890
>The speed of light is incredibly slow
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.
lostmsu
As a side note, if you liked the above comment, but haven't yet read "A Fire Upon the Deep", you will probably enjoy it.
coolspot
Doesn’t matter for training, as all GPUs are colocated in the same DC.
righthand
Louisiana and New Orleans have been pushing to make the city a “tech hub” for the past 10 years (why would you build data centers in a flood-prone basin below sea level? I don’t know). I imagine most of it is striking a sweet heart deal with the municipalities that want the business.
selimthegrim
There were several data centers and colos on Poydras St in downtown when Katrina hit. Famously SomethingAwful was being hosted out of one of them whose remaining on site employee live blogged the whole thing on LiveJournal.
the_real_cher
This will be built in North Louisiana from what I understand, well above sea level.
Hurricanes on the other hand will still be a very real thing.
giancarlostoro
I always told myself if I ever became a "tech billionaire" I'd buy out a random abandoned town somewhere, setup high speed internet, and turn a ghost town into a high tech town, cause why not? You could easily become mayor and approve some reasonable projects. Sell extremely affordable housing for the buck (close to actual cost).
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.
idiotsecant
The major tech companies are all scrambling to snap up cheap energy right now. The result is that we are dumping a whole lot of additional carbon in red states and adding a while lot of additional extremely expensive per MWh sources in blue states. In both cases, the winners will be tech company shareholders and the losers will be the people who actually live in these communities who will end up with dirtier, more expensive power.
matthewdgreen
The losers are going to be the energy companies who think they’re getting long-term energy sales but probably won’t be, since these techniques will get more efficient.
dorkypunk
nitwit005
People using consumer generative AIs are already using it for free, or very cheaply. It may be hard for falling costs to drive more demand.
ericmcer
The demand for energy will never go down, the more we can produce the more we will use.
lotsofpulp
The article says
> 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.
idiotsecant
The techniques will get more efficient, but the quantity of training will increase monotonically. We aren't going to use less energy overall. The ratepayers are absolutely the ones who will lose out on this.
hyability
[dead]
null
JKCalhoun
> The project entails more than 2 gigawatts of computing capacity—Zuckerberg said it could eventually expand to 5 gigawatts—programmed to train open-source large language models.
Given that the human brain takes much longer to "train", I wonder how the energy efficiency pans out — comparing the two.
ashwinsundar
How long does a human brain take to train?
idiotsecant
Biological systems are wildly energy efficient, that's kind of their whole thing. The average human will consume approximately 75kwh worth of calories in their lifetime. There are electric cars with bigger batteries.
[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
ak217
This is wrong by at least three orders of magnitude. Very roughly, a human requires 2000 kcal a day = 2 kWh a day so 75 kWh is enough to cover about a month, putting aside the upstream losses in the energy supply chain (which are far greater for humans).
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.
ctoth
You're off by about three orders of magnitude.
A human consuming 2000 kcal/day (conservative estimate) uses about 2.32 kWh per day. Over 75 years, that's roughly 64,000 kWh.
idiotsecant
Oh, right i did a conversion wrong. Woops. In any case, a rounding error when talking about gigawatts of generation capacity
gowld
Your forget that a biological system has approximately 0 throughput in work done.
Nearly everything a biological system accomplishes depends on massive external machinery.
Humans are only intellectually interesting because of their use of tools.
Location seems to be west of Highway 183 and south of Wade Road in Holly Ridge. It has 6 reviews and a 3.7 rating on Google.
Google Pin: https://maps.app.goo.gl/C9yX2qdw2JXY2Fug6
Some articles name an adjacent location, Highway 183 and Thomas Road