By Jen Liu

April 21, 2025

On muggy days in New Orleans when the humidity is just right, I can hear the electrical grid from my bedroom. A constant crackling hum emanates from the power lines with an occasional snap that sounds like a bug getting zapped. On one such evening, an internet search tells me that the hum is due to the unglamorously named “corona discharge,” or the release of high voltage electricity into the air. When there is more humidity, the resistance of the air decreases, which increases the electrical discharges and thus, the audible sizzle. Another website tells me that corona discharge is often undesirable, signaling power loss or insulation damage, but is generally not harmful. I am reminded of my unexpectedly large electricity bill from a previous summer, billed by Entergy, the private utility that provides power to me and about 1.1 million others across Louisiana. A monthly storm fee was tacked on to the end of the bill, a few extra dollars we each owed to refinance the utility’s costs of repair following Hurricane Ida and Winter Storm Uri in 2021, and Hurricanes Laura, Delta, and Zeta in 2020. I wonder if Entergy will ever get around to re-insulating the lines outside of my house, and if that will save me some money on bills. 

In December 2024, Entergy announced plans to construct three gas-powered plants to support the energy needs of a $10 billion AI data center for Meta in northeast Louisiana. The Meta facility would be built on former farmlands in Richland Parish, where one in four residents live below the poverty line. The proposed facilities would cover four million square feet across 1400 acres of land, while purportedly providing an estimated 500 permanent jobs and thousands of indirect ones during construction. It’s expected to be the first of many data centers as the state welcomes AI and other computationally-intensive infrastructural development, even as an increasing slew of severe, climate-related weather events threaten aging infrastructures. 

Entergy’s eagerness to construct additional power plants is not surprising; across the United States, utilities are keen to cash in on an AI data center boom. Earlier this year, the Chinese company DeepSeek dampened this excitement when they released an AI model and chatbot that uses a fraction of the hardware and computer power of models made by American companies. But these developments have not paused the efforts of local and state governments as they lay the groundwork for future data facilities. In the case of Louisiana, understanding the stakes of this current data center boom requires contending with previous periods of economic development — and who ultimately benefits.

Data centers have predecessors

In early news sources, the Meta facility was named as “Project Sucre,” the French word for sugar. The name harkens back to what could be considered the state’s first economic boom: sugarcane production. When the French began to settle the land near the mouth of the Mississippi River in the early 1700’s, they used the labor of enslaved Indigenous and African people to produce cash crops like sugarcane on plantations. Initial attempts to grow sugarcane were largely unsuccessful, as these plants required drainable lands, a rarity in the delta floodplains. As the colony developed, infrastructures like levees were built to control flooding, while varieties of sugarcane were selected that could thrive locally. In the early 1800s, the region had been acquired as a territory for the United States, and many plantations had transitioned to only growing sugarcane and even processing it into granulated sugar on site. Despite technical advances in production, making sugar was still a labor intensive process and relied on slavery to be so commercially successful. By the eve of the American Civil War in 1860, there were more than 331,000 enslaved people in the state of Louisiana, while the sugar industry was valued at $200 million (or $7.6 billion today). Following the abolition of slavery and the defeat of the Confederacy, the industry could no longer be dependent on enslaved labor and sugarcane production became less profitable. 

Desperate to improve the stagnant economy in this postwar period, the state turned toward other industries. The lumber boom was the first to take root. Beginning in the 1880s, there was a frenzy to log varieties like longleaf pines and cypress trees, as timber supplies had already dwindled in the northeast and midwest United States. The construction of railroad infrastructures across the state facilitated the transportation of harvested timber from rural regions to larger cities. What seemed like an inexhaustible supply was soon depleted over a course of four short decades. The lumber industry’s mentality of “cut out and get out” left barren forests in central parts of the state where pine stands once stood, and crumbling channels sliced into fragile marshlands to pull out cypress trees felled deep in the swamp. 

Lumber was soon replaced by another resource: oil. Politicians offered generous tax incentives for gas and oil companies not only to drill, but to manufacture petrochemical byproducts across the state. These policies include one of the most generous corporate handouts in the country: the Industrial Tax Exemption Program (ITEP). Louisiana’s ITEP, created in 1936 and still active today, allows new or expanding industrial facilities an exemption on local property taxes for up to ten years. This means that instead of individual parishes (counties) collecting taxes from industrial development in their jurisdictions — which could be used for schools, healthcare facilities, and other public infrastructures and entities — companies are offered subsidies. Seeing an opportunity to recoup their losses, many heirs of former plantations sold their land to oil and gas companies, which in turn used them to build oil refineries, petrochemical plants, and related facilities. Currently, over 150 of these facilities are located in the River Parishes along the Mississippi River, in what is known as “Cancer Alley.” The descendants of the formerly enslaved people now live in fenceline communities, facing environmental racism in the form of disproportionate exposure to pollution and environmental hazards. As development took place throughout the 20th century, residents of these communities faced increased health risks as the consequence of toxic exposures, from asthma and other respiratory ailments to miscarriages, infertility, and many forms of cancer. The oil and gas industry also contributes heavily to rising carbon emissions, subsequently warming ocean waters to produce more frequent and intense storms that impact communities near the coast. 

A legacy of resistance

But these booms have not happened without resistance. In the 18th and 19th centuries, many rebellions and insurrections were planned and launched by enslaved people to free themselves. Most notably, the 1811 German Coast Uprising was organized by leaders, including Charles Deslondes, to liberate those enslaved on sugar plantations located along a stretch of the west bank of the Mississippi River. They marched downriver from plantation to plantation with the goal of seizing New Orleans, setting fire to five of them and growing their ranks to the hundreds as more enslaved people joined in. Before the group could reach the city, they were violently suppressed by the planters’ militias.

The generations that followed have also stood up to the petrochemical and industrial facilities that now operate where plantations once stood. In the 1990s, community members in Diamond, a Black neighborhood in the town of Norco, began monitoring the air near their homes with the help of environmental activist organizations.They found that the nearby Shell oil refinery was emitting harmful chemicals that had not been previously reported to the state regulatory agency. The publicized findings led Shell to offer Diamond residents buyouts to relocate, a bittersweet solution. While many residents took the offer to move, some were reluctant to leave homes that had been in their family for generations. Fenceline communities have also resisted new developments. In 2018, the Taiwanese company Formosa Plastics announced plans to build the “Sunshine Project,” a giant plastic manufacturing complex in St. James Parish. Resident Sharon Lavigne founded RISE St. James and filed a lawsuit to rescind the company’s air permits. While the organization won the case in 2022, Formosa Plastics sought an appeal and won their permits back in a higher state court. Even with these setbacks, the fight continues against unjust infrastructural development. In coalition with organizations like Inclusive Louisiana, Rise St. James continues to challenge zoning and development, while other efforts like The Descendants Project are changing the narrative of this region as they develop alternative economies that honor the histories of their ancestors. 

What will we be left with in the inevitable aftermath of the AI boom? While the Meta data center is slated to be in a part of the state that has not historically been a sugarcane producing area, the project has benefited from the legacies of a pro-business political environment committed to extractive economies. Living in the fallout of these previous booms has shown us that residents are often left to shoulder the risks once labor costs rise, the landscape has deteriorated, or when chemicals leach into the water and air. If Meta leaves its data center project before the plants are fully paid off, the cost will be borne by Entergy customers. Furthermore, the gas-powered plants also deviate from any plans the state has for decarbonization and broader climate goals. 

As the hums of corona discharge continue outside of my window, I wonder what new infrastructures might one day take its place. Looking toward the upcoming hurricane season, there’s a clear irony in building more gas-powered plants to support data center megaprojects while anticipating the power outages that inevitably accompany severe weather events. But stories of resistance from the past make clear the need to continue organizing against development that exploits people and the environment for the benefit of a few — while also demanding that the infrastructures we rely on be repaired and made more resilient for climate-related impacts ahead. As more communities are left in the dark, figuratively and literally, there is a need for new infrastructures that can support one another: ongoing efforts to build alternative electricity, communications, and water infrastructures offer ways to reimagine pathways for just community-based development, without the potential empty promise of an AI data center. 

But the road ahead is not smooth. Organizing efforts that work in one place don’t always translate seamlessly into other places. Tactics that might be effective for southern, more urban portions of Louisiana would look different in northern rural communities such as Richland Parish. What is certain is that we are connected through infrastructure. Weathering this boom, and whatever comes next, requires us to recognize and build solidarities across infrastructures, in this case, electrical infrastructure — buzzing power lines, power plants for data centers, and all. 

Jen Liu is a researcher and designer investigating the ecological, social, and political dimensions of computing technologies to build alternatives for livable and equitable futures. She is a PhD candidate in information science at Cornell University and a research fellow at the Critical Infrastructures Lab at the University of Amsterdam. Her work examines the networked infrastructures in changing landscapes of the American South and how technologies can be used to support community safety, agency, and self-determination in the face of climate disasters.