Gov. Jeff Landry announces Meta AI data center in Richland Parish during news conference at Rayville Civic Center on Dec. 4, 2024.
Gov. Jeff Landry announces Meta AI data center in Richland Parish.
Meta’s Odense Data Center in Denmark. (Photo courtesy of Meta)
Computers and servers line the inside of Meta’s 800-acre data center campus in Gallatin, Tennessee, outside of Nashville.
Gov. Jeff Landry announces Meta AI data center in Richland Parish during news conference at Rayville Civic Center on Dec. 4, 2024.
Gov. Jeff Landry announces Meta AI data center in Richland Parish.
Meta’s Odense Data Center in Denmark. (Photo courtesy of Meta)
RAYVILLE- Governor Jeff Landry and Economic Development Secretary Susan B. Bourgeois announced a new Meta AI data center which Landry called a transformational investment and a ‘game changer for the state’ in a news conference in Rayville on Wednesday afternoon.
The $10 billion Artificial Intelligence data center will be located in Richland Parish, just a few miles from Rayville in the unincorporated community of Holly Ridge, a one-time sawmill town.
The facility will be the largest of more than 20 Meta data centers around the world according to a news release from Landry’s office.
“Today, Louisiana begins a new chapter. Today, we are delivering new jobs and economic growth on a scale unimaginable before we took office,” Landry said in the release.
“Meta’s investment establishes the region as an anchor in Louisiana’s rapidly expanding tech sector, revitalizes one of our state’s beautiful rural areas, and creates opportunities for Louisiana workers to fill high-paying jobs of the future. I thank Meta for their commitment to our state, and to the State Legislature for positioning Louisiana to win this project by passing new tax reform legislation that attracts capital investment and improves Louisiana’s business tax climate.”
The data center is expected to bring 300 to 500 full time jobs with an average salary of $82,000 and hundreds of temporary construction jobs — all in an area where the average per capita income is $25,000.
Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, who represents Richland and the adjacent East Carroll Parish, said in November that this project will be a “game changer” for north central and northeast Louisiana.
“East Carroll Parish has the poorest people in the United States of America. Worse than Appalachia, so it couldn’t go in a better place. I’m for it 1,000%, I’m gonna do everything we can,” Campbell said.
Computers and servers line the inside of Meta’s 800-acre data center campus in Gallatin, Tennessee, outside of Nashville.
The $10 billion project will involve the construction of not just the data center but three new Entergy power plants at a cost of $3.2 billion. These new plants will feed the facility the massive amounts of electricity it will need to function.
Two of the natural gas-powered plants will be located in Richland Parish; the third north of Baton Rouge. In its PSC filings, Entergy says it plans to include generation from nuclear, wind and hydrogen co-firing at the new plants which are projected to produce a combined 3,762 megawatts of power. Numbers provided by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission say that much energy could power 1.58 million homes.
Multinational companies looking to be leaders in AI— Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Apple, Meta and others—are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to construct these processing hubs across the U.S. and overseas.
Not every area has the power available to host them.
Microsoft recently signed a power purchase agreement for its Pennsylvania data centers that was large enough to justify reopening the Three Mile Island nuclear plant.
High performance Graphics Processing Units gulp electricity, as do the servers that process the massive data sets. As the AI models “learn” and become more sophisticated, their energy consumption increases. There is no “down” time at an AI facility, which needs huge cooling units to maintain optimal temperatures.
The PSC is fast tracking Entergy’s proposal. At its meeting on Nov. 18, the commission voted to hire an outside law firm and consultant group in order to have the three new plants reviewed by Oct. 25, 2025.
PSC Commissioner Eric Skrmetta said the data center could be up and running with accompanying power plants within three years.
“I feel very, very good about this happening. I’m glad they chose the area of northeast Louisiana,” Campbell said. “Couldn’t happen in a better place.”
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