Facebook-parent Meta will build its largest data center ever in northeast Louisiana, near one of the largest US natural gas fields.
Meta plans to invest more than $10bn in the Richland Parish data center, which will "play a vital role" in advancing Meta's ambitions in artificial intelligence software, the company said.
Construction of the facility is expected to continue through 2030, Meta said.
Richland Parish is "an outstanding location" for Meta to build a data center because of its "access to infrastructure", "reliable grid" and "business-friendly climate", the company said.
Meta's siting decision also was driven in part by "the availability of reliable, low-cost energy", according to Grow NELA, the economic development agency of northeast Louisiana.
The parish is close to the prolific Haynesville shale of east Texas and northern Louisiana, which last year accounted for about 14pc of US dry gas production, according to US Energy Information Administration data. Securing gas supplies in a major gas-producing state like Louisiana may be easier because of the simpler regulatory process behind the construction of intrastate gas pipelines. Gas pipeline construction across US state lines requires the involvement of federal energy regulators, resulting in longer and more uncertain construction timelines.
Meta said it will partner with US gas and power utility Entergy to add "enough clean and renewable energy to the grid to cover 100pc of the electricity use" of the Richland Parish data center, with Entergy adding "clean, efficient power plants to its system" to meet power demand. Meta and Entergy have looked at "options to invest in multiple clean energy options, including nuclear energy," Meta said in a statement to Argus. But it did not respond to an inquiry asking if it had secured supply deals for the facility with electricity generated by any particular fuel source, such as nuclear, gas or coal.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft in recent months have said they expect to fuel their own planned data centers with nuclear energy, which could provide baseload, low-emission electricity to the new facilities. But long timelines and large upfront costs for conventional nuclear power plants, alongside the uncertain emergent technology behind nuclear small modular reactors, or SMRs, present obstacles to nuclear-powered data center development.
For those reasons, the surge in expected US electricity demand through the end of the decade to fuel new planned data centers could, in the short term, translate largely into increased gas demand, Alan Armstrong, chief executive of Williams, the largest US gas pipeline company, told Argus earlier this month.
Data center operators "are in such a hurry, they are just wanting the power", Armstrong said.
