Massive Meta project ‘changes the narrative’ for Louisiana.
by Gary Daughters and Ron Starner
As if to further demonstrate the primacy of power in landing coveted, hyperscale data center projects, Louisiana’s largest utility was the driving force behind Meta’s blockbuster decision to put a $10 billion, AI-optimized data center in economically challenged Richland Parish in the Mississippi Delta. The project, announced Dec. 4, represents the largest private investment in Louisiana history. It is expected to create 500 or more direct new jobs, more than 1,000 indirect jobs and 5,000 construction workers at peak
Louisiana Secretary for Economic Development Susan Bourgeois says the project hit her radar not through a traditional RFP (Request for Proposal), but rather through contacts at Entergy Louisiana, a subsidiary of Entergy Corporation, which also serves customers in Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas.
Meta was “looking at another state that Entergy has a footprint in,” Bourgeois told Site Selection the week before Christmas. That state, it turned out, did not have the capacity to meet the project’s massive energy needs.
“So, Entergy Louisiana came to us and said, ‘We believe we can do this. Are you willing to move heaven and earth to help?’ Truth be told,” Bourgeois says, “that was all we had to hear. There was never going to be a ‘no’ coming out of this administration. And that’s how it started last January.”
“There was never going to be a ‘no’ coming out of this administration.”
— Susan Bourgeois, Secretary, Louisiana Dept. of Economic Development
Natural Gas and Nuclear
In order to serve the Meta load, Entergy Louisiana will make investments exceeding $3 billion, to include three new natural gas-fired power plants with a total capacity of 2,260 MW. Two of the plants will be in close proximity to the 1,400-acre Franklin Farm megasite in Holly Springs, which Meta has expanded for its data center through additional land purchases to 2,250 acres. The plant would be adjacent to Meta’s 4-million-sq.-ft. data center — characterized as the emerging backbone of the media company’s AI infrastructure. (How long has the Franklin Farms megasite been in development? It was featured in Site Selection’s January 2007 story about “Super Sites.”) A third power plant is to be built in southern Louisiana. Pending regulatory approval, Entergy says, the new generators would come online between 2028 and 2029.
Meta expects its data center construction to continue through 2030. Pending regulatory approval, Entergy says, the new generators would come online between 2028 and 2029.
“Revenue from Meta,” Entergy said in a Dec. 5 statement, “will significantly offset the costs associated to make service available to the company’s data center and the region.”
Entergy will also build and/or procure 1,500 MW of new solar and battery storage resources and invest in carbon capture & storage technology at an existing power station in Lake Charles.
Entergy and Meta also have committed to exploring nuclear energy as a future power supply option alongside renewable sources like solar and wind. The day before the announcement of its Richland Parish data center, Meta issued an RFP to identify nuclear energy developers for up to 4 gigawatts (GW) of power “to help us meet our AI innovation and sustainability objectives.”
‘The Vibes are Different’ in Louisiana
To make the Meta deal happen, state officials have had to hustle, as well.
“It’s been this great, almost laboratory experiment of how to get it all done, and get it done very quickly,” Bourgeois told Site Selection. “It was multiple cabinet agencies. It was the Legislature, it was permitting. It became a case study of how we can get really big things done when we’re all pulling on the rope. Any barrier that arose, we addressed it and sort of said, ‘Next.’ ”
To begin with, says Bourgeois, the administration of Gov. Jeff Landry had to persuade the state legislature — on tight notice — to adopt a sales tax exemption for data center equipment. Not to do so, she says, would have been “a non-starter” for Meta. As with many such projects, unexpected challenges arose “every day,” says Bourgeois, citing as an example the frantic phone calls she placed to the state DOT when a lane closure blocked a deepwater drill that was headed to the Franklin Farms megasite to assess an underground aquifer.
“Meta,” she says, “just couldn’t get over how we just kept eliminating those kinds of barriers large and small.”
In addition, Meta will benefit from tax reforms adopted by the state legislature in early December that include the elimination of Louisiana’s franchise tax and the adoption of a flat 5.5% corporate income tax that replaces a tier-rate structure where businesses paid between 3.5% and 7.5%. Personal income taxes were lowered, as well, to a flat rate of 3%, with the standard deduction nearly tripling from $4,500 to $12,500.
“Those are meaningful, substantial changes,” Bourgeois says. “I’ve been saying since I took this job last January that Louisiana needs a narrative change, and Meta goes a long way toward showing that. The vibes,” she says, “are really different around here.” (For more on those vibes, read Site Selection’s interview with Bourgeois from last July.)
Boom Times for Data Centers
What Meta is doing in northeast Louisiana mirrors what’s happening around the country, say experts who study data center development.
Gordon Dolven, director of Americas data center research for CBRE, says that the average vacancy rate for data centers in the U.S. right now is just 2.8% — a fact that he says will cause record high construction for this sector in 2025.
“The 100-megawatt project will be the new norm in 2025,” he says. “Silicon Valley and Hillsboro, Oregon, are seeing longer lead times for power availability.” As established markets grow tighter, Dolven and his colleagues at CBRE expect more data center developers to move toward secondary and tertiary markets across the country.
“We are seeing creative approaches,” says Dolven. “You have to bring the site to the available power now. That means finding pockets of power availability. Places that have excess capacity will be given a look. We are also considering states with tax incentives.”
Dolven notes that certain locations in Louisiana are now attractive to data center developers because of these factors. “When you look at what is driving these markets, tax incentives and economic benefits are now front and center in economic development planning meetings,” he says. “These projects bring in hundreds of millions of dollars. This is recurring revenue that data centers drive. Because they need constant refreshing of their servers, they are annually spending hundreds of millions of dollars on servers, racks and other essential equipment.”
‘The South is on the Rise’
Mike Lash, first vice president on CBRE’s Data Center Solutions team in Atlanta, says, “The South is on the rise. The amount of power capacity that Southern states have is incredible. Plus, they all buy power from each other. It is reliable and stable power. They don’t have the brownouts that you see in other parts of the country. The weather is pretty predictable there too.”
One thing’s for sure, though: Data centers nationwide are getting bigger, more powerful and more expensive. Big tech firms pumped more than $180 billion of investment capital into new data center campuses in 2024, according to a report by Dell’Oro Group. In the third quarter of 2024, four firms accounted for over 81% of the spending in this sector: Meta, Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Because of spending like this, ALM Global LLC forecasts that data centers will continue to be the strongest performing real estate sector in 2025. Currently valued at $242 billion, the global data center market will grow to more than $584 billion in 2032, reports ALM. “The primary concern is power access,” the report states, noting that capacity is already being strained on such sources of energy as natural gas and nuclear power.
Lots of Land Required
And good luck finding a site. A late 2024 study by Cushman & Wakefield noted that in 2024, the average data center parcel spanned 224 acres — a 144% increase since 2022. “This growth is largely driven by data center developers looking to develop multi-building campuses, enabling phased development and future expansion to reach on-site capacity thresholds amid high demand,” the C&W report stated.
Costs to build these mammoth server farms are rising too. The Cushman study found that the average U.S. data center land prices for parcels 50 acres and larger increased by 23% in 2024 to reach a high of $5.40 per square foot in October. Building materials and construction labor costs keep rising as well.
Not that the tech firms are concerned. Of the planet’s seven companies that have a market cap of $1 trillion or greater, five of them are also the world’s biggest spenders on AI hyperscale data centers: Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple.