this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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318
'A Black Hole of Energy Use': Meta's Massive AI Data Center Is Stressing Out a Louisiana Community (www.404media.co)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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! 💪”

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago (3 children)

do they have 2 GW of backup generators, though?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

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.