HOLLY RIDGE, La. — In a rural corner of Louisiana, Meta is building one of the world’s largest data centers — a $10 billion behemoth as big as 70 football fields that will consume more power in a day than the entire city of New Orleans at the peak of summer.

While the colossal project is impossible to miss in Richland Parish, a farming community of 20,000 residents, not everything is visible. For instance, it’s unclear exactly how much the social media giant will pay toward the cost — more than $3 billion — for new electrical infrastructure needed to power the facility.

Watchdogs have warned that in the rush to capitalize on the AI-driven data center boom, some states are allowing massive tech companies to direct expensive infrastructure projects with limited oversight.

Mississippi lawmakers allowed Amazon to bypass regulatory approval for energy infrastructure to serve two data centers it is spending $10 billion to build. In Indiana, a utility is proposing to create a data center-focused subsidiary that operates outside normal state regulations. And while Louisiana says it has added consumer safeguards, it lags other states in efforts to insulate regular power consumers from costs tied to data centers.

There is less transparency due to confidentiality agreements and rushed approvals, said Mandy DeRoche, an attorney for environmental advocacy group Earthjustice.

“You can’t follow the facts; you can’t follow the benefits or the negative impacts that could come to the service area or to the community,” she said.

Under contract with Meta, power company Entergy agreed to build three gas-powered plants that would produce 2,262 megawatts — equivalent to a fifth of Entergy’s current power supply in Louisiana. The Public Service Commission approved Meta’s infrastructure plan in August after Entergy agreed to bolster protections to prevent a spike in residential rates.

Nonetheless, nondisclosure agreements conceal how much Meta will pay.

Consumer advocates tried but failed to compel Meta to provide sworn testimony, submit to discovery and face cross-examination during a regulatory review. Regulators reviewed Meta’s contract with Entergy but were barred from revealing details.

Meta did not address AP’s questions about transparency, while Louisiana’s economic development agency and Entergy say nondisclosure agreements are standard to protect sensitive commercial data.

Davante Lewis — the only one of five public service commissioners to vote against the plan — said he’s still unclear how much electricity the center will use, if gas-powered plants are the most economical option and if the project will create the promised 500 jobs.

“There’s certain information we should know and need to know but don’t have,” Lewis said.

Additionally, Meta is exempt from paying sales tax under a 2024 Louisiana law that the state acknowledges could lead to lost revenue totaling “tens of millions of dollars or more each year.”

Meta has agreed to pay for about half the cost of building the power plants over 15 years, including cost overruns, but not maintenance and operation, said Logan Burke, executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Energy, a consumer advocacy group.

Public Service Commissioner Jean-Paul Coussan insists there will be “very little” impact on ratepayers.

But watchdogs warn Meta could pull out of its contract or not renew it, leaving the public to pay for the power plants over the rest of their 30-year life span, and all grid users are expected to help pay for the $550 million transmission line serving Meta’s facility.

Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard University’s Electricity Law Initiative, said tech companies should be required to pay “every penny so the public is not left holding the bag.”

Elsewhere, tech companies are not being given such leeway. More than a dozen states have taken steps to protect households and business ratepayers from paying for rising electricity costs tied to energy-hungry data centers.

Pennsylvania’s utilities commission is drafting a model rate structure to insulate customers from rising costs related to data centers. New Jersey’s utilities regulators are studying whether data centers cause “unreasonable” cost increases for other users. Oregon passed legislation this year ordering utilities regulators to develop new, and likely higher, power rates for data centers.

And in June, Texas implemented what it calls a ‘kill switch’ law empowering grid operators to order data centers to reduce their electrical load during emergencies.

Some Richland Parish residents fear a boom-and-bust cycle once construction ends. Others expect a boost in school and health care funding. Meta said it plans to invest in 1,500 megawatts of renewable energy in Louisiana and $200 million in water and road infrastructure in Richland Parish.

“We don’t come from a wealthy parish, and the money is much needed,” said Trae Banks, who runs a drywall business that has tripled in size since Meta arrived.

In the nearby town of Delhi, Mayor Jesse Washington believes the data center will eventually have a positive impact on his community of 2,600.

But for now, the construction traffic is frustrating residents and property prices are skyrocketing as developers try to house thousands of construction workers. More than a dozen low-income families were evicted from a trailer park whose owners are building housing for incoming Meta workers, Washington said.

“We have a lot of concerned people — they’ve put hardship on a lot of people in certain areas here,” the mayor said. “I just want to see people from Delhi benefit from this.”

Editor’s note: Brook reported from New Orleans.

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HARRISBURG, Pa. — With electricity bill amounts surging upward, states are under pressure to insulate regular household and business ratepayers from the costs of feeding Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers.

It’s not clear whether any state has a solution, and the actual effect of data centers on electricity bills is difficult to pin down. Some critics question whether states are bold enough to take a hard line against tech behemoths like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta.

But more than a dozen states have begun taking steps as data centers drive a rapid build-out of power plants and transmission lines.

That has meant pressuring the nation’s biggest power grid operator to clamp down on price increases, studying how data centers impact electricity bills or pushing data center owners to pay a larger share of local transmission costs.

Rising power bills are “something legislators have been hearing a lot about,” said Charlotte Shuff of the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a consumer advocacy group. “It’s something we’ve been hearing a lot about. More people are speaking out at the public utility commission in the past year than I’ve ever seen before. There’s a massive outcry.”

Some data centers could require more electricity than cities the size of Pittsburgh, Cleveland or New Orleans, and make huge factories look tiny by comparison. That’s pushing policymakers to rethink a system that, historically, has spread transmission costs among classes of consumers that are proportional to electricity use.

“A lot of this infrastructure, billions of dollars of it, is being built just for a few customers and a few facilities, and these happen to be the wealthiest companies in the world,” said Ari Peskoe, who directs the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University. “I think some of the fundamental assumptions behind all this just kind of breaks down.”

A fix, Peskoe said, is a “can of worms” that pits ratepayer classes against one another.

Some officials downplay the role of data centers in pushing up electric bills.

Tricia Pridemore, who sits on Georgia’s Public Service Commission and is president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, pointed to an already tightened electricity supply and increasing costs for power lines, utility poles, transformers and generators as utilities replace aging equipment or harden it against extreme weather.

The data centers needed to accommodate the artificial intelligence boom are still in the regulatory planning stages, Pridemore said. The Data Center Coalition, which represents Big Tech firms and data center developers, has said its members are committed to paying their fair share.

But growing evidence suggests that some Americans’ electricity costs are rising to subsidize the massive energy needs of Big Tech as the U.S. competes in a race against China for artificial intelligence superiority.

Data and analytics firm Wood Mackenzie recently published a report that suggested 20 proposed or effective specialized rates for data centers in 16 states it studied aren’t nearly enough to cover the cost of a new natural gas power plant.

In other words, unless utilities negotiate higher specialized rates, other ratepayer classes — residential, commercial and industrial — are likely paying for data center power needs.

Meanwhile, in June, Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog for the mid-Atlantic grid, produced research showing that 70 percent — or $9.3 billion — of last year’s increased electricity cost was the result of data center demand.

Last year, five governors led by Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro began pushing back against power prices set by mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM Interconnection after that amount spiked nearly sevenfold. They warned of customers “paying billions more than is necessary.”

PJM has yet to propose ways to guarantee that data centers pay their share, but Monitoring Analytics is floating the idea that data centers should be required to procure their own power.

In a filing last month, it said that would avoid a “massive wealth transfer” from average people to tech companies.

At least a dozen states are eyeing ways to make data centers pay higher local transmission costs.

In Oregon, a data center hot spot, lawmakers in June passed legislation ordering state utility regulators to develop new (presumably higher) power rates for data centers.

The Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board says there is clear evidence that costs to serve data centers are being spread among all customers — at a time when some electric bills there are up 50 percent over the past four years and utilities are disconnecting more people than ever.

New Jersey’s governor last month signed legislation commissioning state utility regulators to study whether ratepayers are being hit with “unreasonable rate increases” to connect data centers and to develop a specialized rate to charge data centers.

In some other states, like Texas and Utah, governors and lawmakers are trying to avoid a supply-and-demand crisis that leaves ratepayers on the hook — or in the dark.

In Indiana, state utility regulators approved a settlement between Indiana Michigan Power Co., Amazon, Google, Microsoft and consumer advocates that sets parameters for data center payments for service.

Kerwin Olsen of the Citizens Action Council of Indiana, a consumer advocacy group, signed the settlement and called it a “pretty good deal” that contained more consumer protections than what state lawmakers passed.

But state law doesn’t force large power users like data centers to publicly reveal their electric usage, he said, so pinning down whether they’re paying their fair share of transmission costs “will be a challenge.”

In a March report, the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University questioned the motivation of utilities and regulators to shield ratepayers from footing the cost of electricity for data centers.

Both utilities and states have incentives to attract big customers like data centers, it said.

To do it, utilities — which must get their rates approved by regulators — can offer “special deals to favored customers” like a data center and effectively shift the costs of those discounts to regular ratepayers, the authors wrote. Many state laws can shield disclosure of those rates, they said.

In Pennsylvania, an emerging data center hot spot, the state utility commission is drafting a model rate structure for utilities to consider adopting. An overarching goal is to get data center developers to put their money where their mouth is.

“We’re talking about real transmission upgrades, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars,” commission Chairman Stephen DeFrank said. “And that’s what you don’t want the ratepayer to get stuck paying for.”

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