BR's exposure to AI energy gamble
Data centers will benefit a few, but we'll all pay if they go dark
Louisiana is in the middle of a gold rush for artificial intelligence infrastructure, but Baton Rouge residents may be taking on more of the downside than they realize.
Why it matters: Every Entergy Louisiana customer in the Capital Region will be directly affected by energy, water and regulatory decisions being made right now for private AI buildout—even though the massive facilities are being built in rural north Louisiana.
Staggering scale: Meta's $10 billion data center in Richland Parish is expected to draw about three times the electricity used by New Orleans. To supply it, Entergy is building three natural gas plants, which the Public Service Commission approved 4–1 last August; critics say it was rushed and sidestepped competitive bidding.
Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services has a $12 billion project near Shreveport and Hut 8 is building a $10 billion campus near St. Francisville.
Leading the cheers: Gov. Jeff Landry has been the most enthusiastic champion. "We are delivering new jobs and economic growth on a scale unimaginable before we took office,” he said at the Meta announcement.
The sales pitch: Entergy and state regulators insist Capital Region residents won't foot the bill—Meta is covering 100% of the new plants' costs and proponents say its 15-year power purchase agreement will save other customers upward of $650 million by strengthening the grid.
The catch: Under fast-track approval rules the PSC adopted in December, data center customers are required to cover only half of infrastructure costs. That means Entergy ratepayers could be left paying the other half in every deal that follows Meta's.
Entergy passes natural gas costs directly to customers as fuel adjustments, with no cushion. Baton Rouge residents already saw July 2025 bills run 8% higher than the year before because of gas price spikes—before any of this new generation for data centers was online.
If AI becomes dramatically more efficient, as China's DeepSeek model suggested, or if Meta scales back, stranded infrastructure costs could still flow to ratepayers. One PSC commissioner voted no specifically because he couldn't get contractual protections against that scenario.
Logan Atkinson Burke, executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Energy, put it plainly: "There is a reason electricity stocks fell alongside tech stocks after DeepSeek. The news of more efficient AI means the plans and promises for unlimited load growth point to the likelihood that energy needs have been overstated."
Drinking water may be the real risk: All of Baton Rouge's drinking water comes from the Southern Hills Aquifer System. Overpumping since the 1970s has caused saltwater intrusion, gradually contaminating freshwater wells. A 2024 USGS report confirmed intrusion is ongoing across most aquifer layers.
Now add water consumption by data centers.
Meta’s Richland Parish facility could pull up to 23 million gallons of water a day from the Mississippi River Alluvial Aquifer — the same regional aquifer system that feeds Baton Rouge. LSU researchers simulated 17 years at maximum withdrawals and found groundwater could fall more than 65 feet under parts of the site, speeding saltwater intrusion and raising the risk of land subsidence across the region. The gas plants built to serve Meta would also draw heavily from the same zone.
And Louisiana doesn’t make the risk easy to track: there’s no mandatory water-use reporting for data centers, so Meta doesn’t have to disclose what it actually pumps. Meanwhile, the Capital Area Ground Water Conservation Commission, tasked with protecting Baton Rouge’s aquifer, has been cited repeatedly by state auditors for weak oversight — and for board members drawn from the very industries they’re supposed to regulate.
