Meta announced plans for a $10 billion investment in December 2024 for a 2,250-acre data centre campus in northeastern Louisiana in rural Richland Parish. What began as an ambitious regional project has transformed into something far larger, with implications that extend well beyond Louisiana's borders.
This week, the company reached an expanded agreement with Entergy Louisiana to construct seven new natural gas power plants. The 10 power plants with 7.5 gigawatts of capacity would represent a more than 30% increase to Louisiana's entire grid capacity. For perspective, the gas plants alone will total 5,200 megawatts, about five times what the entire city of New Orleans uses on an average day.
The Hyperion data centre, as Meta calls it, will also require 240 miles of new transmission lines connecting South Louisiana to North Louisiana and Arkansas, battery energy storage systems, and nuclear power uprates at existing Entergy facilities. Meta is paying for all of it. The 10 power plants are estimated to cost nearly $11 billion.
This structure raises an important question about risk distribution. The deal is structured so that Meta "pays its full cost of service," according to Entergy, which projects the agreement will deliver more than $2 billion in customer savings over 20 years. Entergy argues this means existing residential customers will actually benefit, with savings diverted to cover storm recovery and grid resilience costs.
But the math becomes contentious when you extend the timeline. Critics contend ratepayers could be stuck with the bill after 15 years, which is the length of the contractual terms, if Meta no longer requires so much power after that span. The gas plants themselves have a 30-year operational lifespan.
This concern gained weight recently when Meta sold an 80% stake in the data centre to private equity firm Blue Owl Capital, a move critics argue creates a loophole allowing the tech giant to exit its lease every four years. Commission Commissioner Davante Lewis cautioned that the 15-year power agreement potentially leaves Louisiana households responsible for the remaining costs of the gas plants should Meta exit the state early.
The Louisiana Alliance for Affordable Energy, a consumer advocacy group, expressed these concerns plainly. The group warns that non-binding commitments lack the permanence required for a multi-decade infrastructure build-out, stating that "there are potentially decades of expenses tied to these gas plants".
The broader context matters here. By 2030, US data centre electricity demand is projected to grow by 133% to 426 terawatt-hours. A large portion of this increase came from GPU-accelerated AI servers, which grew in energy usage from less than 2 TWh in 2017 to more than 40 TWh in 2023. The infrastructure race is intensifying.
Last month, US senators pushed to require datacentres and other large energy customers to report consumption, arguing the data is essential to hold them accountable to local communities. Senator Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley noted that Congress and the public currently lack the data needed to hold these companies to the voluntary Ratepayer Protection Pledge that President Trump asked tech companies to sign.
Meta's stated position is that it is bearing the full cost. Rachel Peterson, Meta's vice president of data centres, said the Entergy filing "aligns with the principles in the recently signed White House Ratepayer Protection Plans" and that Meta has been "working closely with Entergy since early on-site planning to ensure Entergy's other consumers aren't paying our costs".
Entergy and state officials frame this as sound economic management. Governor Jeff Landry praised Zuckerberg and Entergy for "prioritising consumer interests," saying "their policy has set a precedent that should be the norm, not the exception".
The genuine tension lies in competing timescales. If Meta pays upfront for infrastructure that remains useful for decades after it departs, existing customers benefit from lower costs. If Meta leaves early and equipment sits unused, ratepayers bear the burden. The 15-year power contract does not fully protect against the latter scenario, and the four-year lease terms to Blue Owl create uncertainty about Meta's long-term commitment.
For now, the deal proceeds. The Louisiana Public Service Commission approved the project under an expedited "Lightning Amendment" framework designed to move large infrastructure approvals within eight months. This reflects real economic pressure: AI development is accelerating globally, and companies will build where they face the least friction. Louisiana made a strategic choice to clear the path.
Whether that choice proves sound depends on factors both parties cannot fully control: whether the data centre remains economically viable in 2040; whether renewable energy becomes cheaper and more practical for AI workloads; whether the benefits of AI innovation exceed the environmental and financial costs of its infrastructure.
What is clear is that the bill for building AI will be vast, and negotiating who pays it has only begun.