Meta to invest $10 billion for Louisiana data center

(Reuters) - Facebook-parent Meta said on Wednesday it plans to invest $10 billion to set up an AI data center in Louisiana, in what would be the tech company's largest data center in the world.

The hyperscaler data center, which is planned in Richland Parish, is designed to process huge amounts of data required to support digital infrastructure, including artificial intelligence workloads.

The development comes a day after Meta said it was seeking proposals from nuclear power developers to help meet its AI and environment goals, adding that it wanted to add 1 to 4 gigawatts of new U.S. nuclear generation capacity starting in the early 2030s.

AI computing has led to a massive surge in the energy needs of Big tech companies such as Amazon and Microsoft, sparking a renewed interest in nuclear power.

But it will be tough to swiftly meet soaring power demand with just nuclear energy due to an ageing fleet of reactors, an overburdened U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, potential uranium fuel supply obstacles and local opposition.

The amount of electricity used by the Meta data center in Louisiana, will be matched by renewable energy for which the tech firm will be working with utility Entergy.

Entergy, which provides electricity to parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, has two nuclear power plants in Louisiana.

The utility previously received legislative approval for investment in transmission and generation to serve Amazon's upcoming cloud services facility in Mississippi.

Meta expects construction of the Louisiana data center to continue through 2030 with site work beginning in December.

(Reporting by Priyanka G and Seher Dareen in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)