USA: USA Rail Terminal has opened a train-to-lorry transloading facility at Monroe in Louisiana, to support the construction of what will be Facebook owner Meta’s largest data centre. This will be used to train future open-source large language models.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the 2GW+ datacenter data centre being built at Richland Parish in Holly Ridge will be so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.
The Monroe rail terminal served by Canadian Pacific Kansas City is capable of handling 90-wagon block trains for high-volume movements of aggregate and other bulk construction materials for the project, supporting both initial construction of the data centre and the long-term supply needs of large-scale infrastructure projects.
‘This is exactly the type of project rail is built for’, said Rich Montgomery, CEO of USA Rail Terminals’ parent company, Alpenglow Rail, on January 13. ‘When you’re moving massive volumes of aggregate and construction materials on a sustained basis, rail delivers unmatched efficiency, reliability and scale.’
Construction of the data centre is expected to run through to the end of the decade. Montgomery said it ‘is one of the most significant infrastructure builds currently underway anywhere in the world. Our job is to ensure that the supply chain never becomes the bottleneck.’
