Richland Parish in northeastern Louisiana, USA, is an idyllic rural area where a huge Meta data center will be built. But instead of using the small nuclear power plants Zuckercorp had previously advocated, the data center chose to burn more fossil fuels to drive its artificial intelligence computing workload.

Meta promises to resolve the issue by the end of the decade. Entergy claims that thermal power plants can be upgraded to completely use hydrogen fuel to generate electricity in the future, but did not disclose the upgrade timetable.

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry hailed the 4 million square foot, $10 billion facility as a "game changer" and one of the largest private capital investments in the state's history. It will also be Meta's largest data center ever.As the governor noted in his announcement, while the facility is scheduled to break ground this month, its construction will "continue through 2030" -- in other words, it coincides with Meta's plans to add nuclear power to its next-generation artificial intelligence data center, which it revealed in a request for proposals (RFP) yesterday.Meta has decided to get a head start on the project by partnering with Entergy. The new data center does not use nuclear power. Meta has partnered with Entergy to build three natural gas-fired thermal power stations with a total power generation capacity of 2,262MW. The thermal power plant will use a combined cycle gas turbine, which is cleaner than traditional gas-fired thermal power plants and can use waste heat to drive an auxiliary steam turbine. But they still release greenhouse gases,

Combined cycle combustion turbine power plants burn natural gas, but are configured (and marketed) to be less polluting than conventional natural gas power plants. In addition to burning natural gas to spin a gas turbine, a combined cycle power plant also uses waste heat to spin a secondary steam turbine, producing even more watts of carbon emissions. Of course, they're still burning natural gas, releasing more greenhouse gases - something Mehta has pledged to address by the end of this decade (with the purchase of emissions offsets, of course).