Meta, Data, & Deleuze
This summer, Meta announced plans to convert 4 million square feet of land in Richland Parish, Louisiana, into a new AI-focused data center. This project, nicknamed Hyperion by Mark Zuckerberg, will begin as a nine-building center to expand into a complex that, according to the CEO, will nearly match the size of Manhattan (Fortune). Confoundingly, these plans still exist to some extent in the world of speculation, with Meta representatives unsure what the center will even power, as the scale of AI will have advanced to an as-yet-unclear degree by its 2030 opening date (Fortune). While the computational impact of this center’s vision is unclear, its environmental impact will be highly detrimental at best and disastrous at worst, especially within a rural community where a quarter of its population lives below the poverty line (Fortune). In a 2024 study, the Berkeley Lab found that the AI boom has rapidly increased the energy demands of data centers, with AI-focused data centers using the most energy compared to all other types, and this trend is expected to continue in the future (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). These plans not only threaten to increase utility prices for communities near these centers but also harm local communities through pollution and excessive water usage. In its 2024 sustainability report, Meta reported a total of 1.39 billion gallons of water used for data centers worldwide, with approximately half of that amount permanently removed from local communities (CNET). This polluted wastewater can also reenter municipal systems, further increasing its damage to communities and wildlife (CNET). In cases like Meta’s Hyperion, this increase in utility usage will also involve the creation of new gas-powered turbines to service the complex, thereby increasing the amount of pollutants being generated (Fortune).
Meta’s data center plans seem to reflect the creation of a new stem of Deleuze’s rhizomatic structure that threatens to poison it entirely. These centers promise to enrich their communities, promising jobs, industry, and community growth, while siphoning resources from small, often lower-income communities. Companies like Meta claim to work charitably in their efforts to reduce pollution and water use, but have little to no plan for how that will scale as AI usage expands over the coming decades. Even though data centers have existed since the birth of the computer, AI’s growth and ravenous need for resources present an existential question: how are we supposed to sustain an ever-growing software on dwindling resources? These data centers have a global impact, from the mining of rare earth materials in their production to the ecosystems they displace during deployment. They place a new level of strain on the rhisomatic structure of the globalized modern world, causing more extraction both internationally and abroad. Not only do these massive compounds require more materials to be gathered globally, causing further environmental destruction abroad, but they also extract more water from the local communities in which they are placed, resulting in local environmental damage. Along with ecological concerns, data centers like Meta’s complex in Richland Parish are often placed in rural, lower-income communities that suffer the most from lost access to reliable, clean water. These expansionist pushes move their environmental impact from harmful to dangerous, as they draw more and more from the world in which they are created. Meta’s data center complex serves as a new addition to the global rhizome that threatens its very existence, causing environmental devastation and local starvation in its wake. Without a concerted effort by state and national governments to regulate these companies and their access to public necessities, such as water and affordable energy, these centers threaten to cripple communities while causing increased harm to the environment.
Works Cited
“AI Data Centers Are Coming for Your Land, Water, and Power.” CNET, https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/features/ai-data-centers-are-coming-for-your-land-water-and-power/. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
Nolan, Delaney. “Meta Is Sinking $10 Billion into Louisiana to Build Its Wildest AI Aspirations, Setting the Template for the Grid Buildout.” Fortune, https://fortune.com/2025/08/24/meta-data-center-rural-louisiana-framework-ai-power-boom/. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
Deleuze, Gilles, et al. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Repr, Continuum, 2003. Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers. K10plus ISBN.
Shehabi, Arman, et al. 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report. Dec. 2024. escholarship.org, https://doi.org/10.71468/P1WC7Q.