Article by Eric Worrell
Did the climate issue ever matter to these people?
A day after nuclear power pledge, Meta announces launch of largest-ever data center powered by fossil fuels
Three natural gas turbine plants at Louisiana site to produce 2,262 MW
Brandon Villarullo
Thursday, December 5, 2024 // 22:20 UTCRichland Parish, an idyllic rural area in northeastern Louisiana, is about to get a huge new metadata center.
But rather than being powered by one of the on-site nuclear power plants Zuckercorp had previously advocated, the facility chose to burn more fossil fuels to fuel its AI computing workload.
This 4 million square foot, $10 billion facility, cheer Facebook's parent company said what Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry called a “game changer” is one of the largest private capital investments in the state's history and will be Meta's largest ever. data center.
Meta decided to skip the project by partnering with Entergy. The power generation company plans to build three combined cycle gas turbine (CCCT) power plants with a total power generation capacity of 2,262 MW.
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Learn more: https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/05/meta_largestever_datacenter/?td=rt-3a
As I predicted a few weeks ago, the insatiable demand for energy driven by artificial intelligence will inevitably exceed the ability to meet this demand through low-hanging fruit such as recommissioning nuclear power plants. But I expect they'll wait a few years until the climate movement is safely over and buried before going crazy with new fossil fuel plants.
To be fair, Facebook's energy partner Entergy claimed in the article that the power plant could run on up to 30% green hydrogen. I'm sure this will happen one day. must. After a while, they put wings on the pigs.
If you’re interested in understanding why AI requires such crazy amounts of energy, and why the insatiable demand for AI is causing big tech companies to ditch the big green, the following article explores AI energy use in detail.
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