ScienceAIReportHow an ‘icepocalypse’ raises more questions about Meta’s biggest data center projectThe community around Meta’s giant new data center in North Louisiana was hit hard by a winter storm and freezing temperatures. How will the power grid hold up once the data center is online?
The community around Meta’s giant new data center in North Louisiana was hit hard by a winter storm and freezing temperatures. How will the power grid hold up once the data center is online?
Justine CalmaFeb 11, 2026, 2:06 PM UTCLinkShareGiftIllustration by Nick Barclay / The VergeJustine Calma is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.Donna Collins lives about 20 miles from where Meta’s biggest data center is being built, in a house her family has lived in for five generations. Construction has thrown the small agricultural community in North Louisiana into the spotlight as a high-profile example of how the infrastructure behind generative AI could impact nearby residents.
For Collins, this place is “a little piece of heaven.” “It’s all I’ve ever known as a home. It’s quiet. It’s rural. It is beautiful,” she says. “We can’t imagine the changes that are coming.”
The region was particularly hard-hit by the recent cold snap that knocked out power for hundreds of thousands of Americans. Frigid temperatures raise electricity rates — as well as questions about how ready power grids will be for future disasters while straining under growing pressure from data centers. Louisiana has built back time and again from storm after storm, but now community members and advocates want assurances that energy-hungry data centers won’t add to the costs.
“We can’t imagine the changes that are coming.”
“We’re very nervous,” Collins says. “When the wind blows, electricity goes out here in a lot of these remote areas. We live in an area where electricity is kind of uncertain as is.”
The recent “icepocalypse,” as Collins described, arrived with a January 24th winter storm. The storm was only the start — forecasters had warned that persistent freezing temperatures would allow ice to build up on trees and energy infrastructure across a large part of the US east of the Rockies. The weight of that ice can bring power lines crashing down or snarl them with falling branches.
By February 5th, local utility Entergy Louisiana said that it had finished restoring power to almost 130,000 customers affected. Collins says her home, which is served by an electric cooperative, lost power for four days. She also owns a property she uses as an Airbnb, served by Entergy, which lost power for a few days.
Meta might be Entergy’s most controversial new customer in the area. The utility is building three new gas plants to supply enough electricity for Meta’s $27 billion AI data center in Richland Parish. The facility is expected to use three times as much electricity annually as the city of New Orleans. Meta’s data center and two of the gas plants are under construction, with the data center slated to be completed in 2030. It’s too soon for them to have had an impact on the power grid during this storm.
