Louisiana is hoping that an enormous data center will spur economic growth, but residents fear the negative consequences.
Meta, the eighth-largest company in the world, is building an artificial intelligence data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana. The construction is upsetting people's daily routines and already driving up their power bills, CBS Evening News reported.
"It's always noise, all the time," Lisa Hopkins said. "... We honestly didn't know how big of a scale it was going to be. ... Some mornings it's hard to get out of our driveway, just because of all the dump trucks."
The family's utility bill is up $13 a month over last year's, and the data center's demand for energy is expected to spike gas prices, too. Almost 25% of the parish's citizens live in poverty, according to CBS, and Entergy will pass on the cost of a $550 million transmission line for the facility to all its 1.1 million customers in the state.
Meta's revenue in 2024 was $164.5 billion, and the project is pegged at $10 billion. A spokesperson said the company has been in the community every day, spending $1 million to help low-income customers pay their bills and earmarking $200 million for local infrastructure projects as well as school programs to aid the area, per CBS.
An expert said the data center will use three times as much energy as New Orleans does every year.
"It's up to state regulators, really, to step in and protect consumers and make sure that tech companies and utility companies are paying their fair share for this development," Paul Arbaje, an energy analyst in the Union of Concerned Scientists' Climate and Energy program, told CBS.
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"It's not fair. It's not something that we asked to be put here," Hopkins said of the Meta data center.
Resident Donna Collins added: "I definitely don't feel like I had a say, and I don't know many people that do."
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