Information facilities have gotten so massive that their energy calls for now rival whole U.S. states. Take Meta’s Hyperion AI information middle, for instance. When accomplished, the brand new AI information middle will draw as a lot electrical energy as South Dakota.
Final week, Meta introduced it will fund seven natural gas power plants — on prime of the three it had already dedicated to constructing — to help the $27 billion information middle. When mixed, the ten energy vegetation in Louisiana will generate round 7.5 gigawatts of electrical energy, slightly more than the capability of the whole Mount Rushmore State.
Like many tech corporations, Meta has touted its local weather and environmental bona fides over time. It usually publishes sustainability studies, and it often crows about its renewable power purchases. It successfully purchased a nuclear energy plant for 20 years.
Meta’s Hyperion information middle website in Louisiana will check the corporate’s commitments.
Pure fuel has been hailed as a “bridge gas” — construct just a few pure fuel energy vegetation now whereas renewables, batteries, and nuclear get their legs below them. That’s virtually definitely how Meta is justifying the transfer internally.
However folks have been making the bridge gas argument for many years, and it’s sporting just a little skinny. Renewables and batteries have plummeted in worth whereas costs for fuel generators have skyrocketed. Meta has been a number one purchaser of photo voltaic, batteries, and nuclear lately, which makes the choice to go massive on pure fuel all of the extra perplexing.
TechCrunch reached out to Meta. The corporate didn’t reply to a number of requests for remark.
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
The huge generators in Louisiana will dump 12.4 million metric tons of CO2 into the ambiance yearly, in accordance with TechCrunch’s calculations, which relies on information from the Division of Power. That’s 50% greater than Meta’s whole carbon footprint in 2024, the latest 12 months such numbers can be found.
That determine is an underestimate of the local weather affect, too, because it doesn’t embody leaks from the pure fuel provide chain.
Methane, the principle part of pure fuel, warms the planet 84 occasions greater than carbon dioxide. Even leakage charges of 0.2% alongside the availability chain could make pure fuel’ local weather affect worse than coal. Within the U.S., pure fuel manufacturing and pipelines leak methane at a fee that’s closer to 3%. That’s hardly clear energy.
The corporate’s newest sustainability report makes no point out of methane leaks. It doesn’t point out methane or pure fuel in any respect. And but the gas is poised to turn out to be one of many largest contributors to Meta’s carbon footprint within the coming years.
The corporate might nicely persist with its local weather pledge and discover a solution to offset these emissions by means of carbon removing credit. However now it would want much more of them, together with an sincere accounting of precisely how a lot methane will leak into the ambiance in service of feeding its new energy vegetation.
