Meta✴ recently announced its intention to build its largest data center worth $10 billion in Louisiana (USA). According to Silicon Angle, the facility will become the company’s largest data center. Construction of the Franklin Farm campus will begin in December and will last until 2030. The infrastructure, including network equipment and servers, will be initially optimized for AI workloads. The total area of the campus will be just over 900 hectares, the area of buildings will be more than 370 thousand m2.
Louisiana officials said the construction of the data center campus will provide the region with new technological capabilities. Meta✴ announced that in addition to creating jobs, the company will invest $200 million in improving local infrastructure, incl. into roads and water supply systems. After the launch of the data center, the Community Action Grants program will also begin to organize partnerships with local schools and organizations – the forge of future personnel for the company. During construction, more than 5 thousand workers will be involved, and after completion the data center staff will be about 500 people.
Image source: Meta✴
As noted by The Next Platform, the campus rendering is very reminiscent of AMD EPYC. And this is not an accident – the computing “chiplets” buildings are located around a central “IO hub”. Modern AI clusters really consist of separate so-called. “islands”, within which the speed of data exchange and connectivity is much higher than outside them. The buildings at the top right may serve some kind of data storage functions. The “green areas” surrounded by trees are probably ponds for storing water for cooling.
For its campus, Meta✴ has promised to use 100% “clean” and renewable energy. True, you shouldn’t delude yourself on this score. The company will buy green energy elsewhere, but the 1.5 GW campus itself will be powered by a 2.2 GW Entergy gas power plant under construction nearby. In its sustainability report, Meta✴ announced that it had 11.7 GW of renewable energy contracts to offset the consumption of its data centers in 2023, 6.7 GW of which was in the US. Meta✴’s global energy consumption exceeds 12 GW, but the company aims to receive another 1-4 GW from nuclear power plants by the end of the decade.
Image source: Meta✴
Meta✴ also announced that it intends to minimize water consumption in the new data centers. According to NPR, the average data center requires more than 1,135 m3 of water per day—the same amount consumed by 1,000 US households. Meta✴ promises that water “restoration” projects in Louisiana will allow the company to obtain more fresh water as a result of its activities than it will waste itself. However, where the sediment will go after cleaning the data center waters has not yet been specified.
According to preliminary estimates, of the $10 billion in investments, about half will go to AI accelerators. With an average price of around $25 thousand, we can talk about 200 thousand AI accelerators. If Meta✴ uses its own MTIA accelerators, which are half the price of third-party ones, we can talk about 400 thousand. Against the background of xAI’s plans to expand the Colossus AI cluster from 100 thousand NVIDIA accelerators to 1 million, the Franklin Farm project looks modest. However, as it turned out, more than 100 thousand NVIDIA H100 are already used to train the Llama-4 model.