Locator: 49181LDC.
RBN Energy: Meta's massive data center development puts focus on Louisiana. Archived.
Data center mania is sweeping across the U.S., grabbing headlines and spurring investor interest. It has now reached Louisiana, where Meta is building one of the largest developments in the Western Hemisphere. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll look at two gigantic projects planned for Louisiana, the early challenges the Bayou State faced in luring developers, and why it may now be a strong contender to emerge as a major Southern data center hub after a relatively slow start.
First, a quick refresher. As we discussed in God Blessed Texas, the Lone Star State is easily one of the nation’s leaders for data centers, with only Virginia edging it out in both data center counts and associated power demand. Texas hosts more than 350 data centers, far more than the two dozen or so operating in its neighbor to the east, but Louisiana has two hyperscale projects being built that are generating plenty of attention because of the size and capital involved.
The $10 billion site being constructed by Meta in Richland Parish (more on this below) in northern Louisiana is slated to consume about as much power as the city of San Diego (though the city’s peak loads can be higher) and could boost the state’s electricity consumption by an eye-opening 15%.
Louisiana hasn’t always been on the radar for giant data center projects. It has historically lagged behind states like Texas because it lacked the basic infrastructure to lure those projects. The Dallas-Fort Worth area, a prime location for data center development (see Where You Lead I Will Follow), has benefited for years from a dense fiber-optic backbone and fast internet speeds (we’ll discuss this in further detail in a future blog), while Louisiana’s broadband network has ranked in the lower third nationally, without the speed or reach of many other states. Louisiana also didn’t offer many tax incentives to data center firms. Major tech firms want reliable fiber, steady power and business incentives. Without those, Louisiana wasn’t seen as especially attractive to data center developers.
Louisiana lawmakers made big changes to close the state’s broadband gap and quickly ramped up incentives to bring in Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. In 2024, the state received more than $1.3 billion in federal broadband funding to deliver high-speed internet statewide. State legislators also passed Act 730 (HB 827) in June 2024, which established generous sales tax rebates for data center equipment. That law paved the way for more tax incentives, including property tax abatements and payroll credits, all designed to attract data center projects. The process was fast-tracked, and lawmakers crafted legislation in a single session to seal the Meta deal. Those efforts gave Louisiana a compelling package for Meta to build in Richland Parish, including tax rebates on the billions of dollars it is spending on data center equipment.
It's very likely that with these changes, Louisiana is setting itself up to host more data centers.
As we discussed recently in Won’t Get Fooled Again, we’ve been grappling with the challenges of tracking and ranking data center projects in Texas and Louisiana, in part to help us better assess their impact on power and gas demand in Gulf Coast gas markets, as tracked in our proprietary Arrow Model. In that blog, we explained that we’re using a scoring system that assigns each project a score from 1 to 3 based on public information. A project ranks as a 1 if it has an offtaker, a 2 if it also controls the site, and a 3 if construction is underway. Projects missing these criteria don’t make it into our detailed forecasts.
The Arrow Model carves up the region into pipeline “corridors” (aka arrows) that are used to determine changes in the region’s inflows, outflows and flows within each state via groups of pipes that serve similar markets from comparable supply sources. Data centers have been emerging as an important data input in the model because it’s likely their ongoing development will result in significant bump-ups in power and gas demand in various parts of Texas and Louisiana.
Next, we’re going to dive into two major projects under development in Louisiana.
Figure 1. Proposed LouisianaData Centers. Source: RBN
Of note, Lumen Technologies is also headquartered in Monroe, Louisiana. As I said earlier, I don't believe in coincidences. LOL. From AI overview:
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Lumen
Nvidia: Jensen Huang is not through buying; he just spent $900
million (~ $1 billion) to hire Enfabrica CEO, license AI startup's
technology; link here.
- Efabrica's technology: can connect more than 100,000 GPUs together;
- currently, Nvidia's racks come with 72 GPUs installed working together;
- e.g., the kind of system announced by Microsoft today: a $4 billion data center in Wisconsin;
- Microsoft's Wisconsin AI data center, part of a $7.3 billion campus in Mount Pleasant, connects its servers with fiber optic cables . The facility is built to operate as a single AI supercomputer, and the vast scale and speed requirements of AI workloads necessitate fiber over traditional copper links.
- While the specific provider for the Wisconsin data center's fiberoptic cables isn't directly stated, the partnership between Microsoft and Lumen Technologies for next-generation AI infrastructure indicates Lumen is a likely key supplier for Microsoft's network needs, including those at the Wisconsin facility.
- Lumen has reserved a portion of Corning's fiber-optic cable production to support AI-driven applications, and their agreement will help meet the surging demand from large data centers like Microsoft.
- Lumen Technologies and Corning are collaborating and have established a supply agreement where Corning will provide Lumen with its next-generation optical fiber and cable to expand Lumen's network infrastructure for high-bandwidth applications, particularly for Artificial Intelligence (AI) data centers. Corning's innovative, fiber-dense cable system allows Lumen to install significantly more fiber in the same conduit, increasing network capacity and preparig Lumen to support major cloud data center clients.
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