Entergy's plan to power Meta’s massive data center in northeast Louisiana is being portrayed in starkly different terms in new filings, with advocacy groups warning of the potential for major outages and company officials maintaining that safeguards will be in place to prevent them.

The utility is asking state regulators to build three new gas-fired power plants at a cost of $3.2 billion plus other transmission infrastructure for an airport-sized facility in Richland Parish. The data center would help Meta – the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp – expand its artificial intelligence technology and compete with rival companies like Google and OpenAI.

Powering the data center would draw more than twice the maximum capacity of New Orleans’ peak summer demand.

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