The Trillion-Dollar A.I. Data Center Tsunami —Coming To A Field ...
“This will be a defining year for AI,” said Mark Zuckerberg on his Facebook blog last month, hyping his plan to invest $65 billion in 2025, most of it in support of growing Meta’s AI capabilities and building upon its Llama 4 model.
Meta's Sucré Data Center Project
The locus of these efforts appears to be on 2,250 acres of flat farmland in northeast Louisiana, where Meta has begun work on a $10 billion data center project. This grandest of Meta’s 20 worldwide data centers will be called Sucré (i.e. sweet) and cover 4 million square feet of floor space on 2,250 acres.
To power racks lined with thousands of Nvidia H100 GPUs, Sucre will require 2.23 gigawatts of 24/7 electricity (enough to power more than 2 million homes), which utility company Entergy will provide via twin high-efficiency natural gas turbines at a capital cost of $3.2 billion. Meta’s plans also call for $250 million in related infrastructure spending, including roads and water systems. Construction jobs will peak at 5,000.
The Future of AI Data Centers
Is this really going to get built? And is it even a good idea, given recent revelations from DeepSeek that building advanced machine intelligence might be cheaper, and less energy-intensive than initially believed.
For some perspective, an analyst at energy consultancy East Daley Analytics in Denver, who tracks data center announcements, provided insights on the likelihood of such projects and their electricity demands.
Even if AI energy efficiency improves exponentially, the demand for power to train and operate AI models could be substantial due to the Jevons Paradox, leading to an increased need for data centers and electricity.
The Impact of AI Development
According to the analysis, America’s tsunami of advanced data centers could demand an additional 81 gigawatts of electricity by 2030, equivalent to powering all of Texas today. Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and OpenAI are heavily investing in AI technologies, further driving the need for power.
To address environmental concerns, Meta has committed to achieving carbon neutrality in its operations, with plans to invest in renewable energy sources like solar and wind to offset the carbon emissions of the Sucré data center.
Conclusion
While the development of AI data centers presents significant challenges in terms of energy consumption and environmental impact, companies are actively exploring solutions to mitigate these issues and drive continued innovation in the AI space.
