Meta will be able to power more than 5 million homes with the 10 gas-fired power plants that it ordered for its massive Hyperion AI data center complex in Richland Parish in northeastern Louisiana, which is apparently expanding from its earlier plans, Fortune magazine reported on Friday.
That’s more than triple what had been announced last year.
The Louisiana Public Service Commission approved last year Entergy’s proposal last fall for three new gas plants, paid for by Entergy ratepayers, as Ned Randolph explained in an opinion piece for The Lens a year ago.
Now, as of an announcement on Friday, Meta has a new deal with Entergy, to build and finance seven additional new power plants in Louisiana, Fortune reported.
The Louisiana Public Service Commission will have to approve the additional seven plants.
Meta is paying $11 billion for a 10-plant deal, Fortune noted, for a total “7.5 gigawatts of capacity, … a more than 30% increase to Louisiana’s entire grid capacity.”
Renewable energy will add an additional 2.5 gigawatts, according to Fortune.
Meta officials disagreed with Randolph’s conclusion about who foots the bill. “We’ve been working closely with Entergy since early on-site planning to ensure our power needs are met and, importantly, so that Entergy’s other consumers aren’t paying our costs,” said Rachel Peterson, Meta vice president for data centers. Entergy, too, says that Meta will be paying, not passing along costs to taxpayers.
In Oregon, which became early data center hub partly because of its plentiful and relatively inexpensive hydropower, rates paid by customers of Portland General Electric rose 50% over the past five years, reports the Minnesota Reformer in a story that also notes that governors are naming data-center owners as “very large” utility customers, a new category of customers who must, among other stipulations, cover the full cost of their electric service and any system upgrades needed to serve them reliably.
The gigantic Richland Parish site started at 2,250 acres in December 2024 and will now be expanded to 3,650 acres, as Fortune reported in February.
That’s the size of 2,700 football fields.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said Hyperion would cover a “significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.”
