The parent company of Facebook plans to build a $10 billion data center campus in Louisiana to cater to the artificial intelligence boom in a move that officials expect will open the floodgates for development of more of this type of property in the state.
Menlo Park, California-based Meta said site work will start this month on a 4 million-square-foot data center hub in Richland Parish, a community with less than 20,000 residents in northeast Louisiana. The data center campus will be Meta's largest in the world, and the deal is being touted as the biggest private capital investment in Louisiana's history, officials said in a statement this week.
Construction on the site will continue through 2030, and the project is expected to spark new economic activity and investments throughout northeast Louisiana from multiple industries, according to the statement.
Meta is expected to take advantage of Louisiana's new incentive program that offers tax breaks for data center projects for 20 years with the possibility of a 10-year extension. As part of the deal, Meta plans to invest more than $200 million in local infrastructure improvements, including roads and water systems, to make way for the project.
"This project opens the floodgates for data center development in Louisiana, and we are prepared for what’s ahead,” said Rob Cleveland, president and CEO of Grow NELA, an economic development group for the Northeast Louisiana region, in a statement.
Meta said the data center catering to AI workloads for Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads will be its 23rd data center in the United States and 27th in the world.
"This custom-designed 4 million-square-foot campus will be our largest data center to date," Meta said in the statement. "It will play a vital role in accelerating our AI progress."
The AI boom has led large cloud providers to new U.S. data center markets as they hunt for power and land sites to build bigger and more powerful data center hubs. Data centers are projected to consume up to 9% of total U.S. electricity demand by 2030, up from 4% in 2023, according to the Department of Energy.
Power needs have pushed unlikely places, such as Ohio, Idaho, West Texas and now Louisiana, into the data center spotlight when it comes to housing big developments. Tech giants such as Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle are seeking new frontiers to house AI applications as power is becoming scarce in the more traditional and biggest data center markets.
Louisiana project
To power the data center, Meta signed a deal with Entergy Louisiana, a subsidiary of New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., a public utility and Fortune 500 company that has 3 million customers across Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
Entergy plans to add clean and efficient power plants to its system to help power the campus that is expected to span more than 1 mile from front to back, according to the statement. Meta has pledged to match its electricity use from the campus with 100% clean and renewable energy and is working with Entergy to bring at least 1,500 megawatts of new renewable energy to the grid through the utility's Geaux Zero program.
The single agreement with Meta raised Entergy’s annual sales growth rate projection 3 percentage points, an Entergy spokesman told CoStar News in an email. Entergy’s projected growth rate now stands at 11% to 12% through 2028.
More details about Entergy's power deal with Meta were not disclosed. Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment from CoStar News.
The project is planned for a 2,250-acre tract that was once known as the Franklin Farm mega site about 30 miles east of Monroe, Louisiana, and about two hours east of Shreveport, Louisiana, the state's third-largest city after New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
At peak construction, Meta estimates 5,000 workers will be developing the project. Once built, the data center hub spanning multiple buildings is expected to employ 500 or more workers, the company said.
"Richland Parish in Louisiana is an outstanding location for Meta to call home," Meta Director of Data Center Strategy Kevin Janda said in a statement. "It provides great access to infrastructure, a reliable grid, a business-friendly climate and wonderful community partners."
Other sites Meta had been considering for the project were not disclosed. Meta has pledged to restore more water than it consumes at the Louisiana data center by investing in water restoration projects in the state. The details of how it would restore water to the area were not immediately available. AI data centers tend to use more water than a typical data center because of the cooling equipment needed for servers that run much hotter.
Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Susan Bourgeois said in a statement that the project is "an example of what Louisiana can accomplish when economic development partners play offense rather than waiting for good projects to come to them."
Meta’s historic investment is "just the beginning" of the state's "bold strategy" to expand and diversify its tech sector and "prove to the world that when Louisiana says that we are ready to compete on the global stage, we mean business," Bourgeois said.
CoStar News' reporter Mark Heschmeyer contributed to this article.