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Meta’s Richland Parish Data Center is making steady progress.
Updates on the company’s social media show that construction trailers have been moved to a large parking area on site, and dirt work continues on the 2,250 acres Meta is leasing from the state for its 4-million-square-foot AI data center.
A recent graphic from Meta shows just how large the Richland Parish site is when superimposed over Manhattan, New York.
A map showing the Richland Parish Meta Data Center- as big as 70 football fields- superimposed in purple over Manhattan, NYC.
The Louisiana Department of Economic Development is stressing that those who want to apply to work with the three general contractors on the job — Mortenson, DPR Construction, and Turner Construction Co. — should apply via the Richland Parish Data Center website, not to the individual contractors.
As of March 27, Mortenson had 11 job openings listed, Turner had 21, and DPR 22. Many of the positions were leads or other senior management. Meta has stated that at the peak of construction, more than 5,000 construction positions will be employed.
There is a lot going on in the fast-changing data center world.
JLL, a commercial real estate and property investment group, says Nvidia Corp.’s new and more efficient graphics processing unit called Rubin Ultra, due out in 2027, will use 400% more power than the current Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPU.
According to JLL, that would mean one rack of computers in a data center would use 600 kilowatts of power, compared to the 21 kW used currently. It is not known what GPUs Meta will use, or if more powerful units were factored into the original energy estimates.
An aerial view of the Richland Parish Meta AI Data Center property.
For the current projected power needs of the Richland data center, Entergy has agreed to build three new power plants: two in Richland Parish and a third planned for north of Baton Rouge.
In its PSC filings, Entergy says it plans to include generation from natural gas, nuclear, wind and hydrogen co-firing at the new plants, which are projected to produce a combined 3,762 megawatts of power, or enough to power some 1.6 million homes.
That 3,762 MW would power roughly 6,270 AI data center racks at the new estimate of 600 kW per rack. It is not known how many racks the Richland AI Center will host.
A digital infrastructure website states that “hyperscale data centers offered by cloud service providers (such as Meta) can house several hundred or even thousands of racks.”
In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on Facebook, “We’ll bring online ~1GW of compute in ’25 and we’ll end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs.”
Dirt work completed by the Meta AI Data Center in Richland Parish, La.
East Daley Analytics, an oil and gas analysis and consulting firm, has launched a “Data Center Demand Monitor” to show power estimates and quantify demand of the different data center sites around the U.S.
It reports that so far, data center demand along with other current non-data needs will require a 15% to 20% boost in U.S. gas production.
East Daley further believes the growing demand will have an impact on costs that “is likely to raise residential and commercial power costs and significantly affect natural gas producers and U.S. midstream companies.”