Meta’s plans to build a data center complex in Louisiana is spurring new scrutiny of how little the tech industry is disclosing about the energy usage — and emissions — of these facilities. The $5-billion data center is poised to have an appetite for electricity nearly three times bigger than the total power demand from the city of New Orleans, such that the utility Entergy proposed building multiple massive new fossil gas plants to power it.
Last week, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) sent Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter pressing the Facebook parent company for “analyses, data, or calculations” that show how much energy Meta projects the facility to use, why other generating sources wouldn’t work instead of gas, and why the social media giant hasn’t announced investments into equipment to capture the carbon from the power plants or else to separately remove equivalent sums of carbon dioxide.
“This flies in the face of Meta’s climate commitments and its claims that it has achieved net zero emissions in its global operations,” the senator wrote in the letter. “Meta’s promises to offset this new fossil generation by funding carbon capture and a solar project are vague and offer little reassurance. I worry that this quest for profits over climate safety is misleading the public on Meta’s progress toward achieving net zero emissions.”
The letter marks just the latest example of a mounting backlash to the impacts of the United States’ construction boom in data centers to power artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency software.
Last fall, an analysis by The Guardian crunched numbers and pegged the total emissions from in-house data centers owned by Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta at nearly 8% higher than the official tally. In December, the Department of Energy issued a report forecasting that data centers’ total share of all U.S. electricity output will triple to 12% by 2028. By January, lawmakers in at least eight states had plans to propose new guardrails on how tech companies power server farms.
The state bills span the nation’s partisan divide. In blue New York, Democrats proposed a bill in March that would require data centers to report energy usage every year and block state incentives for new projects powered by fossil fuels. In deep-red Texas, Republican-sponsored legislation that passed overwhelmingly in a Senate committee vote last week would tighten rules on new data centers and give state regulators a “kill switch” to cut those facilities’ grid connections during electricity shortages.
“There’s a real problem here, where we have…no guarantee that projects will offer a good return on investments, especially with fluctuations we see in the market around things like AI,” said Jackson Voss, the climate policy coordinator at the Alliance for Affordable Energy, a consumer watchdog that advocates for Louisiana ratepayers.
“These are big investments being made primarily with the risk being borne by taxpayers and ratepayers for customers of utilities,” he added. “They’re going to be caught paying for it even if things with Meta don’t work out.”
A Harvard Law School paper in March found that ratepayers may be on the hook for billions of dollars of new power investments that are set to primarily benefit tech giants. Author Ari Peskoe told Latitude at the time that even solutions to avoid the traditional cost-sharing model — like colocation, peak shaving, and special contracts — could still end up shifting costs to consumers.
“All else being equal, supply goes down, costs are going to go up, at least in the short term,” he said. “The potential cost shift here is these plants basically exiting the market to have private agreements with Google, Amazon, et cetera, and that’s going to cause market prices to go even higher than they already have been.”
The scale of Meta’s data center and the secrecy surrounding its deal with the state have made that project particularly controversial.
When proposing the new gas plants, Entergy, Louisiana’s largest utility, filed hundreds of pages of documents to state regulators that redacted the name of the company with which it was working. Entergy spokesperson Neal Kirby directed questions about Whitehouse’s letter to Meta, which in turn told Latitude Media to contact the utility.
In an email to Latitude Media, Meta spokesperson Ashley Settle said the company “worked closely with Entergy from the beginning to plan for our energy needs and the energy needs they have across their customers for their overall projected growth.”
She highlighted Meta’s pledge to help triple U.S. production of nuclear power and its early investment in geothermal energy. But nearly a week after Whitehouse sent the letter, she said the company had not yet finalized a reply.
“We received the letter and look forward to providing a response,” Settle wrote in the email. “I don’t have a comment on the letter itself.”
