A massive data center for Meta’s AI will likely lead to rate hikes for Louisiana customers, but Meta wants to keep the details under wraps.
Holly Ridge is a rural community bisected by US Highway 80, gridded with farmland, with a big creek—it is literally named Big Creek—running through it. It is home to rice and grain mills and an elementary school and a few houses. Soon, it will also be home to Meta’s massive, 4 million square foot AI data center hosting thousands of perpetually humming servers that require billions of watts of energy to power. And that energy-guzzling infrastructure will be partially paid for by Louisiana residents.
The plan is part of what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said would be “a defining year for AI.” On Threads, Zuckerberg boasted that his company was “building a 2GW+ datacenter that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan,” posting a map of Manhattan along with the data center overlaid. Zuckerberg went on to say that over the coming years, AI “will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership. Let’s go build! 💪”
So we spent decades working on energy conservation, switching to LED light bulbs, efficient AC, etc just to see it all get sucked into these fucking data and AI centers.
Just wait and see what happens if the Big Stupid Bill passes. It’s got shit in there making it nearly impossible to regulate AI.
It’s really uplifting when you put it that way, yes
Data center owners should work as aggressively as possible to build solar and wind capabilities. It would be best for all parties involved. They’d get cheaper energy and it would benefit everyone by not polluting as much.
Even if they cannot power all of their energy needs with renewables they could build some every year.
These companies are so rich they can easily afford it.
I have a personal conspiracy theory that part of the AI hype is pushed by dirty energy companies. Most American politicians say we can’t remove dirty energy plants until we have enough clean energy to replace them. AI (and some other technologies) increase energy demand in a way that counters any clean energy production being built, such that the dirty energy production will always be needed unless we’re willing to shut some things down.
Politicians say we can’t scale down production below demand, so dirty energy companies benefit most from inflating demand instead of shutting down and being replaced with clean alternatives.
You guys know Murphy’s law that says anything that can go wrong will go wrong? I think it was an indirect law about capitalism that extends enshittification. “If anything can be enshittified for profit, it will be.” and that includes fucking up infrastructure and dare I say progress.
once again billionaires get the ‘volume’ price break which poor people have to subsidize.
awesome… ‘progress’
I was just thinking electricity should be charged at reverse volume, the more you use, the more expensive each Gw is. It’ll never happen, but if we wanted to tackle this issue, it’s what we should do.
Sounds like tax brackets.
Data center riots when they cause a blackout during the summers 3rd heatwave?
The irony is that they often have backup diesel generators, so even if they cause a blackout they will still be able to service everyone’s AI requests to do their homework for them
Thank god our power is being sucked up for cheating and generating AI porn.
What Zuckerberg did not mention is that “Let’s go build” refers not only to the massive data center but also three new Meta-subsidized, gas power plants and a transmission line to fuel it serviced by Entergy Louisiana, the region’s energy monopoly.
do they have 2 GW of backup generators, though?
A properly built data center will be able to cover its full usage. They are just scaling up a known method. High availability is built into these things.
When a data center loses power for any length of time, it is a big deal requiring a full investigation and mitigation.
that’s a lot of fuel. and smoke too.
and I assume they need to replace all that fuel once in a while even if unused, because it goes bad in a few years
They do. There’s some companies that will condition, polish, clean and even eventually rotate out the fuel as part of a subscription.
Between maintaining power supply, backup power and cooling, data centre facilities maintenance is more than a full time job.
You mean three weeks into summer? We started our summer with a massive heatwave where I am.
4,000,000 Square Feet = 37.161216 Hectares
4,000,000 Square Feet = 0.37161216 Square Kilometers
