During dinner at the restaurant Gabrielle, on Orleans Avenue in the Treme, I was distracted. Not by the food, service, or atmosphere: it was lovely as ever, my favorite restaurant in New Orleans, and as close to the experience of K-Paul’s you can still get without a time machine. Rather, it was my glass of wine that had me vexed, a Burgundy from Domaine Jean-Jacques Girard. Again, not because it was bad—but because it was so good. Jean-Jacques Girard is my go-to wine, at home or on the town, because it is affordable and exquisite. The winemaker’s family has been growing grapes in the Côte de Beaune for five hundred years, which is long enough to get pretty damn good at anything.
The topic of conversation at my table was a Facebook AI data center in North Louisiana, which the state legislature had just approved. Facebook didn’t choose an unincorporated area near Rayland, Louisiana, population: 3,000, because it had some secret technical talent waiting to be tapped. They chose it because it was ideal for exploitation: poor and rural. The Republican legislature knew the data center would be an environmental catastrophe: the facility is the size of Manhattan, and uses three times as much electricity as the entire city of New Orleans. And residents didn’t figure into the decision at all: agriculture is the only industry in the parish, but the data center—to be the largest in the world—will use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per day.
