Along the Mississippi Delta in the northeast corner of Louisiana, Meta is building one of the largest artificial intelligence data centers in the world. The tech giant’s project will cost $50 billion and cover roughly six square miles.
Behind the scenes, an extraordinary amount of secrecy was necessary to pull it off. Energy company executives, Louisiana’s governor, state and local officials and representatives of Meta worked on the deal over nine months before it was made public. The project’s speed and covertness have been trumpeted as a model for the entire tech industry.
To report on the project, New York Times reporters interviewed more than 40 people in Richland Parish, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, New York and Silicon Valley, and examined corporate filings, tax records, property records and meeting transcripts.
Here are five takeaways from our reporting:
Securing an energy supply was a crucial part of Meta’s project.
When Meta’s employees scouted Louisiana and nearby states for potential data center sites, it was Louisiana’s largest energy company, and not state officials, that first pitched the Silicon Valley company on Richland Parish.