re: META is building the AI data center in Holly Ridge, Louisiana.

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What a random place to put this but that should do wonders for that area. Why didn’t this area industrialize more?

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I'm not sure why things have been slow there....but Monroe seems to be a natural region for large scale OEM automotive assembly or parts manufacturing. For some reason when all the Asian and German manufacturers started moving on-shore...they all scattered across Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, George, and South Carolina. Louisiana may have been a common "plan B", but we never scored a big one when there was a flurry of new plants going up in the southern US between 1985-2015.

There is still a huge GM plant that still operates in the Dallas metro (builds their popular full sized SUVs), but the GM facility in Shreveport shut down during the great recession. I believe the Shreveport plant made S-10 pickups, mid sized pickups, and eventually Hummers for 30-40 years when it finally shuttered. Most of GM's domestic ICE products are made in the midwestern US or in Mexico. Most of their manufacturing investment outside of EV's seems to be going to South Korea and Mexico. Their EV investments are in Ohio and Michigan and they are slowing down with that. GM is trying hard to standardize their architecture, so they will probably need fewer manufacturing plants in the future...not more.

I think Toyota has a big plant in San Antonio area, but they've moved a lot of production to Mexico. They've got a newer plant to make hybrid cars and sedans outside Tupelo. Their older plants in the US are in Kentucky. They closed their joint venture plant with GM in California - that's where Tesla makes cars now. I don't see Toyota expanding ICE production in the US, and they are VERY slow to invest in EV production. They will probably start in one of their existing plants when they do, but there's an outside shot that Toyota may want to do a purpose-build EV plant eventually - maybe Louisiana can try to nab that one.

Honda is another possibility - they are still using GM technology for their EV's, and their internal design is probably 2-5 years away from viability and at least 5-10 years away from necessitating American manufacturing. But they could eventually be looking for a new site in north America for EV's. Honda is very careful to share architectures between all their vehicles, so when they make an investment for EV's in the US....it likely will be for a large facility that can handle multiple models.

VW is developing EV's, but they seem to be settled in Tennessee for their production. They believe they'll be replacing ICE sales with EV sales eventually on a 1:1 basis. It's probably not realistic, but for now they are not going to expand much in the US beyond Chattanooga.

Ford was building a huge EV plant outside Memphis, but they've scaled back that plant when they realized that people don't really want EV's. Ford is pretty disorganized, but they seem to have settled on Tennessee for their future EV plans. They have the space and plans for a massive facility there NE of Memphis near Jackson, TN.

My thesis is that the opportunity for big auto may have passed us now that the ICE manufacturing capacity is now mature. The shift to EV's will spark more opportunities, but that's turning out to be a slow move because the market isn't responding well to EV's - so our opportunities for attracting big auto may not be for another 10 years

What we can potentially develop in south Louisiana is the battery processing and manufacturing. That's a very real opportunity that is starting to slowly come on line. If we can get a big EV manufacturer up in Monroe or Shreveport - it would create more urgency with standing up more battery processing facilities in southern Louisiana.

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State has really put a lot of money into this site after they lost the opportunity for that Toyota plant. A lot of those "mega sites" already have sewer, transmission lines, and fiber installed.

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LED has a catalogue of them. I'm counting 7-8 in the Baton Rouge metro area alone - including 4 massive ones that are right next to large power plants.

Surprising number of them along I-12 between Baton Rouge and Hammond, although those may be more ideal for distribution or manufacturing than data centers.....

Francis Thompson must be licking his chops at the thought of more of those empty Poverty Point Reservoir spots finally being sold (maybe).

I was up in that area a week or so ago and there's a massive solar farm being put up just south of Charmingdale along both sides of Hwy 165 (mostly McHenry land, but some pieces owned by River Valley Properties - whomever that is). LINK It's about 1 mile long (along the highway) and .5 to .75 of a mile wide.

I have to wonder if that may be part of the enticement.

The I 20 corridor has plenty land along it for development. Three 4 year universities Grambling. LA Tech, and ULM, plus Delta Community college and the fmr votech schools under its umbrella for education. Lots of natural gas pipelines throughout the area as well. Also, Entergy has a nuclear power plant across the Ms river in Port Gibson.

Rural NELA is safe from hurricanes, and easier to physically secure those centers. Google, Microsoft, and Musk companies can all come here. NELA is ready for your business and investment.

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I had to google to even know where Holly Ridge is

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That won't be the case for long. In a few years Holly Ridge and Bee Bayou will be the epicenter of the free world.

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And an abundance of gas and water to run these data centers. Would be awesome if, instead of using solely freshwater, they could clean and recycle water from the Haynesville field to help run these things. Maybe those plans are in the works?

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They don't consume water.

The cooling water is in closed loops. They have refrigeration chiller plants that cool the water which is then fed into heat exchangers. The warm water cycles back into the chillers.

I have seen facilities that proposed placing cooling loops into local rivers rather than having chiller plants. The EPA paperwork wasn't worth the effort and time lost.

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That's a lot of megawatts. I work in a data center that runs a fortune ten company and its under 10MW.

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1500MW is a lot but I did some back of the envelope calculations when Elon announced the X Colossus system. Just the system would be in the range of 50MW. That didn't include the storage, networking or cooling infrastructure. Those gpus are some power hunger parts. So, a few large systems like this plus extra capacity for furture power hunger gpu growth and it sorta makes sense.

Also, it's possible other companies might want to move nearby.

Pretty sure it is going to consume an absolute shitload of water. Figuring out where that is going to come from has been one of the bigger hurdles, to my understanding..

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Data centers especially one of this size require technicians and facility engineers.

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A couple of “facility engineers” in the LA Delta:

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may not be everyone's cup of tea so to speak but there is some really pretty land and nice lakes up there. It's not a horrible place to live.

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yeah. There are worse lives than a nice patch of land and nice home out in the country with a couple folks making 160-200 combined.