Meta has begun work on the $10 billion AI plant in Richland Parish in northeast Louisiana, which the company predicts will be finished by 2030. However, controversy has arisen over the environmental impacts of the plant, as well as questions about its impact on the local community.
The plant will cover an area equivalent to 70 football fields and will consume three times the amount of energy that New Orleans currently uses, pushing the city’s energy initiative back to 2050. Entergy CEO Drew Marsh discussed the company’s plans at the Tulane Future of Energy Forum in early September.
“It makes it harder to reach our goals in the near term, but I think it has the potential to make it easier in the long term,” Marsh said. “2030 is going to be tough, but I think we still have a good shot at 2050, because Meta can bring its $2 trillion company to bear on this problem and help us clean up.”
Caryn Bell, assistant professor of social, behavioral and population sciences at the Tulane University Center for Community-Engaged Artificial Intelligence, still questions the impact of the plant.
“It’s going to be a major impact on the state long term [because] of things like [tax] revenue and potentially impacts on the environment,” Bell said. “Who is going to have permanent jobs? Is it going to be people who are from that area, or is it going to be people who are from outside of the area? And with the economic impact, is it going to be long-term or not?”.
Bell encouraged students to participate in decision-making processes related to innovations such as AI.
“Students need to be involved in the community to the degree that they can, and hearing what people outside of the university are saying about these topics is really important,” Bell said.
Bell also said AI raises a societal dilemma.
“I think broadly in our society, using things like ChatGPT, or other forms of generative AI, can really have a detrimental [effect] on people as individuals and on our society as a whole. We have to balance the benefits of using AI for things like health research as opposed to using AI for things like testing and writing papers,” Bell said. “We have to be more people-focused than technology-focused.”
Rob Cleveland, director of the economic development authority in northeast Louisiana, said that the plant is already leading to “exponential growth” for small businesses in the area.
Professor Aron Culotta, the director of CEIA, said he is also worried about the environmental impacts, but is looking forward to what the plant will bring to New Orleans.
“The last I heard was that the plant was going to take up three times the energy of New Orleans. And it worries me quite a bit, both for the environmental impact as well as for the cost to energy users who are not AI,” Culotta said. “But, there are economic benefits to having our only Fortune 500 company build [the Meta plant], and our job as citizens is to make sure that those benefits reach all of our citizens equally.”