Meta is sinking $10B into rural Louisiana to build its wildest AI aspirations

https://fortune.com/2025/08/24/meta-data-center-rural-louisiana-framework-ai-power-boom/

25•voxadam•1h ago

Comments

mritterhoff•1h ago

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.

matthewdgreen•47m ago

Who is this non-binding promise being made to, and why make one?

JKCalhoun•44m ago

"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.

juujian•43m ago

Classic Mark "trust me bro" Zuckerberg

blitzar•38m ago

Dumb fucks

juujian•44m ago

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...

mritterhoff•25m ago

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.

chris_va•13m ago

As an aside, methane leaks from coal mines can be worse than upstream leaks from O&G.

h1fra•35m ago

burning fossil fuel and depleting the local water aquifer, I'm starting to miss the greenwashing era

estearum•24m ago

Behaving a certain way to pretend being virtuous, it turns out, is almost as good as actually being virtuous.

maxehmookau•20m ago

Adding natural gas to the definition of green energy is absolutely wild. How on earth did that pass?

jjice•15m ago

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.

dublinben•13m ago

Louisiana has a long history of political corruption, and the petrochemical industry is a major part of their economy.

JKCalhoun•48m ago

> 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.

idiotsecant•45m ago

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

ctoth•35m ago

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•33m ago

Oh, right i did a conversion wrong. Woops. In any case, a rounding error when talking about gigawatts of generation capacity

trylist•25m ago

We're efficient once we have the energy, sure. How much energy does it take to go from raw sunlight to a calorie your body is actually able to use, and finally to your dinner table?

mushroomba•3m ago

All of our food was alive before we ate it. All calories used by living things are efficient. Life is an end unto itself. It does not need to justify its existence by the moral code of technocrat materialism. The fact that this discussion is being had on this board in good faith is morally condemning of our worldview.

ak217•30m ago

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.

idiotsecant•47m ago

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•46m ago

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.

idiotsecant•36m ago

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.

dorkypunk•6m ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

lxm•6m ago

Interesting that they bring up water consumption https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o

jimt1234•4m ago

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.

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